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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food as medicine

Food as Medicine Platform Foodsmart Expands Reach to 7.4 Million Patients as it Reels in $10M in Fresh Funding

Today, food as medicine and telehealth startup Foodsmart announced an expansion of its “Foodscripts” program and a new round of funding. The company says it will reach up to 7.4 million patients across three major healthcare systems: Advocate Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Intermountain Health. These healthcare systems, alongside the American College of Cardiology and Glen Tullman’s 62 Ventures, have invested $10 million as part of an expanded Series C investment (now up to $40M) as part of the expansion.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating to create a healthier life overall.  As chronic diseases continue to be a predominant health issue in the United States, there have been calls for our health system to provide better nutritional guidance to patients. The growth in food-as-medicine has come alongside growing usage by at-risk patients of GLP-1 drugs as a reasonably fast way to manage their weight. However, GLP-1 drugs are expensive and often require daily self-administered injections. Foodsmart and other food-as-medicine proponents see “food care” as a better, longer-term, and less costly solution, as well as one that can be paired with initial “jump starter” usage of GLP-1 drugs to get quicker and sustained outcomes.

In an email to The Spoon, Foodsmart outlined the different components of the program expansion:

  1. Extended Reach: The program will be extended to 7.4 million patients across the funding healthcare systems, which the company says represents a substantial increase in its impact and potential to improve health outcomes.
  2. Enhanced Funding: The additional $10 million funding brings the total Series C investment to $40 million.
  3. Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations with healthcare systems and organizations, which Foodsmart says emphasize the importance of integrating nutrition into healthcare and highlight Foodscripts’ potential to transform patient care.
  4. EHR Integration: Foodsmart has developed an Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration, which they say will enable providers to enter and track Foodscripts more easily for insurance purposes.
  5. Upskilling Providers: Foodsmart will start emphasizing upskilling healthcare providers. This involves educating them on the latest scientific data and best practices for addressing the nutritional needs of patients with various chronic diseases.

The growth in offerings within the formalized healthcare community around nutrition guidance comes at a time of increased attention among technology platform providers around personalized nutrition and metabolic health management. Startups like January.AI are providing AI-powered solutions that help those at risk of metabolic disease ways to manage their caloric intake and the impact on their blood glucose levels without having to use a continuous glucose monitor. Other startups like Supergut are tapping into the growing awareness of metabolic health – largely driven by rising awareness of the impact of GLP-1 drugs – by providing over-the-counter supplement approaches that claim to have some of the same benefits as these medications.

Investment in this space has been a countervailing trend to slowing interest among venture investors in plant-based food and other better-for-you offerings, which has been victimized in part by a broader venture slowdown as well as slower-than-expected growth of some of the high-profile, high-fliers in the space, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

Podcast: Talking Food as Medicine With NourishedRX’s Lauren Driscoll

NourishedRX provides meals, groceries, and meal kits to individuals, tailored for their individual needs and preferences.

Lauren Driscoll

The company, which recently raised $6 million in seed funding, has developed an AI platform that matches members with personalized meal and grocery offerings. It works with healthcare providers to incorporate food as part of an individual’s long-term health plan.

I caught up with NourishedRX CEO Lauren Driscoll recently to hear how the company got its start and what she sees as the current state of the current food-as-medicine market.

You can listen by clicking play below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

COP26 Spotlight: Eagle Genomics and the New Frontier of Microbiome Data

The microbiome is the collective genetic material of all the microorganisms that inhabit an environment, like the human gut or a particular soil. Eagle Genomics, an England-based company, is developing a platform that uses data about that genetic material to drive innovation.

At yesterday’s special COP26 session on nutrition and health (hosted by the U.N. Climate Change Global Innovation Hub) speakers discussed technologies that could help to address food and nutrition challenges while limiting climate change to 1.5 degree Celsius of warming. In his talk at the session, Eagle Genomics CEO Anthony Finbow made a case for microbiome science as a future driver of food system transformation.

“We don’t need to go into space to discover the new frontier,” Finbow said at the session. “We need to look within ourselves and within the soil to really understand how we are going to solve for climate change.”

That new frontier is in the human gut, where trillions of bacteria interact with human epithelial cells, sending signals to each other across a layer of mucus. And it’s in the rhizosphere, the dynamic space around a plant’s roots where microorganisms come to feed on nutrients produced by the plant, and provide protection from pathogens in exchange.

Symbiotic relationships between microbes and larger organisms are fundamental to life as we know it. According to Finbow, the importance of those relationships has long been overlooked. Now, however, “we’re seeing major enterprises across the world acknowledge the contribution of the microbiome and recognize its importance,” Finbow said.

Businesses are now unlocking microbial knowledge to improve human health, create safer products, and grow food crops more sustainably. DayTwo of Israel analyzes individuals’ microbiome data to provide personalized nutrition recommendations. Joyn Bio, a collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and Leaps by Bayer, is engineering improved microbial strains that can deliver more nitrogen to plants, cutting down on the need for fertilizers.

Eagle Genomics wants to become a network for businesses like these—as well as farms and research establishments—to collaborate and share data. The company’s cloud software platform uses network science, AI, and causal analysis to analyze microbes and their relationships to each other.

The company is currently working on its Series B raise, which Finbow estimated will amount to $30-50 million. They’ve received contracts from large enterprises for the use of their software platform, and have recently begun offering access to research establishments at a lower price point.

Throughout his presentation, Finbow was optimistic about the potential for microbial science to reconfigure our relationship with the environment and the way we think about human health.

“It is possible, by integrating the way we farm animals and grow plants in a way that nurtures the microecology in the soil, to actually reverse climate change—to actually start to capture more carbon and maintain that carbon within the soil,” Finbow said at the session. “It is possible for us, by engineering the microbiome of animals and ourselves, to live healthier lives and to subsist in a more sustaining environment.”

Report: S2G Ventures Talks Alt-Protein, the Digitization of Grocery, and Other Areas of Food the Pandemic is Reshaping

“We continue to see the pandemic act as a catalyzing agent to accelerate trends that were in motion before it began. We believe that food and agriculture has undergone significant structural changes that will alter the course of the industry.” 

So says a new report from S2G Ventures, a VC firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The report, titled “The Ingredients for a Food System Revolution,” analyzes eight pandemics and outbreaks throughout history to pinpoint patterns around financial and economic recovery, innovation, and behavioral changes and norms. The analysis gives a clue as to how the current COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping norms, particularly when it comes to how we produce, get, and eat our food.

As an investment firm, S2G focuses mainly on the food and agriculture sectors, and counts AppHarvest, Shenandoah Growers, and Trace Genomics among its portfolio companies. It follows, then, that the new report is largely focused on how pandemics, epidemics, and outbreaks in the past have changed our food system and how the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to do that at this very moment. “More decentralization [is] going to occur, more convergence of food and health, more decommodification as well,” Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, tells The Spoon.

As the report notes, “While there are many factors influencing the future of our food system, the study of past pandemic economic history is starkly consistent – an innovation cycle begins, and old habits and norms do shift.” 

A couple especially compelling areas where this is happening include alternative protein and online grocery.

As traditional meat-processing facilities face challenges and the unit economics for some types of alt-protein go down, we’re seeing more of the latter make its way into the mainstream. Krishnan explains we are moving more and more towards an “all of the above” view of protein. “I think there’s going to be animal protein, plant protein, and cell protein,” he says. Production of animal protein, in particular, will see “natural momentum around more niche, regional, decommoditized” products. Plant-based proteins, meanwhile, will see an increased focus on nutrition and affordability, while more countries will follow Singapore’s lead when it comes to cultivated meat. China is another important place to watch in this area, according to Krishnan.

S2G’s report also honed in on channel digitization, and specifically on the grocery sector. The report notes that a forced transition to online grocery during the pandemic “exponentially increased penetration from 24% to 49% between 2019 and 2020. Seniors became the fastest-growing segment of online shoppers on Instacart in 2020. In future, consumers will take “a hybrid approach” to groceries, and retailers will start to slightly differentiate what they sell online versus in the brick-and-mortar store.

The report also calls out controlled environment agriculture, a convergence of food and health, and food and agriculture digitization as other key areas to watch in terms of how the pandemic is reshaping the food system.  

“We can build a more resilient and hopeful food system that both addresses planet health and human health coming out of this,” says Krishnan. “Let’s use the pain and the agony and the anxiety that occurred as a call to action.

Food Tech Show: Talking Food as Medicine With Dr. Robert Graham

You get sick, you take a pill right?

Not according to Dr. Robert Graham. As a Harvard trained physician and a trained chef, Dr. Graham wants to get at the root cause of our illnesses through diet.

Ever since I met Dr. Graham in Japan at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, I’ve watched him work with food companies and retailers to build scalable approaches to food as medicine and have realized he’s perhaps the industry’s leading advocate and voice for food as medicine.

Dr. Graham joined me on Clubhouse to talk about food as medicine where we discuss:

  • The current state fo food as medicine
  • How new approaches like DNA-driven medicine and microbiome testing fit within food as medicine
  • The role food brands and retailers play in food as medicine
  • And much more!

As always, you can find more Food Tech Show podcasts at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Telenutrition Platform Foodsmart Raises $25M

Foodsmart, a personalized telenutrition service, announced yesterday that it has raised a $25 million Series C round of funding. The new round was led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, a subsidiary of Advocate Aurora Health, with participation from Mayfield Fund, Seventure Partners (Health for Life Capital), New Ground Ventures, Benefitfocus Founder Shawn Jenkins, Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman and former Darden Restaurants CEO Clarence Otis. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Foodsmart to $76 million.

Based in San Francisco, CA, the Foodsmart platform hosts a national network of registered dietitians to counsel users, and offers subscribers personalized meal plans as well as a marketplace to order food online. The company works with employers and health plans, and says it has 1.25 million members. Foodsmart also does price comparisons and discount discovery to help families on the SNAP program.

Foodsmart is also offers Foodscripts through its platform. These Foodscripts use clinically validated diets to help users overcome obesity, hyperglycemia, heperlipidemia, hypertension and more through nutrition.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating as an important part of creating a healthier life overall. Last year, grocery giant Kroger jumped into the space by testing out a concept where doctors wrote food prescriptions for their patients. These food prescriptions were fulfilled at a Kroger store with the help of a Kroger health professional. Genopalate is taking another approach by personalizing nutrition based on a person’s DNA.

The pandemic changed the way a lot of us eat, as restaurants shut down and we reached for more snacky, comfort foods. Now that the pandemic is receding and we go back out into the world, the food as medicine trend could kick back up as people re-connect with more active lifestyles.

Brightseed Raises $27M for its AI-Based Phytonutrient Discovery

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to aid food companies in the discovery of new nutritional compounds in plants, announced today that it has raised $27 million in new funding. The round was led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood and brings the total amount raised by Brightseed to $52 million.

According to Brightseed, just 1 percent of the compounds produced by plants is known. Brightseed’s Forager AI tool looks at plants on a molecular level to reveal these hidden phytonutrient compounds (examples of phytonutrients include caffeine in coffee and antioxidants in blueberries). Once discovered, Forager adds it to its database as uses that information to make predictions about any implications those new phytonutrients may have for human health.

In June of this year, Brightseed announced a partnership with Danone, which owns Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, to discover new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed is actually in the middle of three converging food tech trends right now. First, sales of plant-based food has surged during the pandemic, so the ability to mine plant-based resources to excavate new, additional nutrition benefits could help sustain that growth.

Second, Brightseed is part of a growing movement of using AI to model and predict unique attributes of food. Spoonshot is using AI to help companies create whole products via data before they even begin prototyping in the real world. And Climax Foods, which recently launched, is using data and AI to develop new plant-based foods, starting with cheese.

The idea with all these AI tools is to do a lot of the heavy lifting via algorithm before experimenting in the more costly real world lab setting. We’re still very early on in this trend, so it remains to be see how effective AI modeling really is.

Finally, Brightseed is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which has people paying more attention to the types of food they consume. In particular, Brightseed is looking at how phytonutrients it discovers can help with metabolic health, cognitive health, immune health, bone health.

Brightseed’s financial health is certainly robust with today’s announcement. The company will be using its new bulked up warchest to invest in R&D of its AI and commercialization of its plant-based discoveries in the food and beverage sectors.

Danone to Use Brightseed’s AI to Uncover New Health Benefits of Soy and Other Plants

Danone North America and Brightseed announced today that they have formed a partnership to use Brightseed’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform to profile and uncover health benefits of key plant sources.

Part of the food as medicine movement, Brightseed is a three-year-old San Francisco startup that examines plants on a molecular level to uncover hidden phytonutrients that can contribute to healthier lifestyles. As it uncovers compounds, Brightseed’s AI platform is then used to predict what impact they will have on the human body.

An example of a phytonutritional compound would be something like the caffeine in coffee or the antioxidants in blueberries.

“We use AI to illuminate the dark matter of nutrition,” Sofia Elizondo, Co-Founder and COO of Brightseed told me by phone this week. “Once you have completed this circle of knowledge. You can transform the food ecosystem.”

Elizondo explained that Brightseed’s platform works for both the sourcing and production sides of CPGs. On the ag side, it can help identify healthy compounds and encourage plant breeding to maximize those benefits. For CPG companies, Brightseed can help source plants that are beneficial and reveal new phytonutrients in existing plant ingredients around which new products can be built.

The partnership with Danone, which owns the Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, will start with Brightseed turning its AI on soy to illuminate the unknown health benefits of soy.

Brightseed, which has raised and undisclosed sum of venture funding, is among a wave of companies using AI to unlock new understandings of our food. Other companies like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems are using AI to help predict flavor trends and novel food combinations.

But while those companies are looking at existing data, Brightseed is building an entirely new body of data from which entirely new discoveries can be made.

“A lot of technology in our field is built to manipulate nature,” Elizondo said, “There is so much more to learn from what nature has already provided.”

COVID Could Usher in a New Trend: Frozen Food as Medicine

It seems that Americans are turning to frozen food during the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI) reported that sales of frozen food jumped 94 percent in March of 2020 compared to a year before, and continued to rise by 30 percent in April.

Granted, considering the source it’s best to take the report’s numbers with a grain of salt. But this growth actually makes a lot of sense. Frozen food keeps for a long time. Americans are wary of grocery stores and worried about feeding their families, so it follows that they’d stock up on staples that can last for months and be ready when needed.

Curious to see if this was an opportunity for more curated frozen meals, this week I spoke to Christine Day, CEO of healthy frozen meal company Performance Kitchen, about how COVID has affected their sales.

“Every week the volume is picking up,” Day told me. While they had to halt their business with Delta Airlines, for whom they provided some meals for first-class passengers, she said that their online business is up over 200 percent.

Day said that when the pandemic first hit, consumers were stocking up with lots of bulk food. Then there was a phase of over-indulgence: there was “a lot of lasagnas,” she said. Now, Day thinks we’re at a phase when consumers are shifting away from bulk and comfort food to seek out healthier choices.

At the same time, consumers are still looking for convenience. Meal kits can offer that to some degree, but they require preparation and also have a relatively short lifespan in terms of how long it takes for the food to go bad. Frozen meals offer more flexibility. “When you buy a frozen meal you have a choice if your plans change,” said Day.

Performance Kitchen has two branches: Performance Kitchen and Performance Crafted (formerly called Eat Local). Both focus on providing nutritionally balanced frozen meals for specific dietary needs: keto, maternity, vegan, etc. Performance Kitchen makes wholesale meals for sale in 10,000 grocery stores nationally and online. Performance Kitchen Crafted, on the other hand, is a physical store where consumers can come and shop for branded frozen meals. It has six brick and mortar locations in Seattle.

Since COVID has forced those stores to shut their doors, Day said that Eat Local has pivoted to D2C sales and curbside pickup. Before the pandemic they only delivered to the West Coast, but they rolled out national shipping three weeks ago.

Performance Kitchen is not only positioned to tap into the rise in frozen food demand, but also new interest in a burgeoning trend: food as medicine. “People are really focused on immunity health, recognizing that issues like diabetes, hypertension, etc. increase our risk,” Day said. She credited this focus with one of the reasons they were seeing so many more sales during the COVID pandemic.

What’s remains to be seen is if the success of frozen meals, specifically those offering a food as medicine angle, will continue post-coronavirus.

Food-as-Medicine Doctor Embraces Telehealth To Run Practice During Coronavirus

In a given week, Harvard-trained physician Robert Graham normally sees about twenty patients at his New York based medical practice where he combines traditional medical approaches with the rapidly emerging area of food-as-medicine.

But that all changed this past week as his town of New York City came to grips with the reality of COVID-19 and the CDC advised everyone to practice stay at home as a way to slow the pandemic.

To deal with the new reality, Graham sprung into action and started to implement a telehealth system that would allow him to continue his patient visits in an era of social distancing. He began to use a platform called Clocktree, a telemedicine platform with Zoom-like video conferencing capabilities. He also started requesting his patients use wearables like the Apple Watch to allow him to access their heart rate.

Graham started utilizing this new approach this past weekend and so far, he’s making it work.

“I did seven visits this weekend and have transitioned all appointments to virtual calls,” said Graham. ” I have closed my office till April 1st and transitioned all patients to this platform.”

I asked Graham if all of his patients were on board with using telehealth and he told me most have agreed, but not all.

“So far, about 70% have agreed, 10% rather just jump on call, 20% want to wait and reschedule for an in person visit.”

Telehealth has certainly gotten lots of attention in recent days as a way to expand the reach of over-taxed front-line medical experts to diagnose and treat COVID-19 patients, but it’s clear it’s also becoming a valuable tool for also family practitioners and specialists like Graham to connect with patients during extraordinary times.

I asked Dr Graham if he’s had to make any significant changes to the way he provides care as he transitions, at least temporarily, to telehealth?

“Yes, I had to clean my house,” he joked.

The Biggest Hurdle for Personalized Food? Consistency.

When it comes to food, I suffer from a devastating condition called choice paralysis. What do I want for dinner? Kale or spinach salad for lunch today? This ice cream shop has how many flavors?

First world problems, I know. But choice paralysis is one thing that personalization could help: by looking at data from past purchases and nutritional predispositions, we can more easily get high-quality recommendations for what to cook and eat, both in and out of our home.

In search of this type of future-focused perspective, we asked Peter Bodenheimer, partner at food business accelerator Food-X, to share his thoughts onstage at Customize. He’ll join us on February 27th to give a birds-eye view of the personalization trend, share how startups are trying to tap into the trend, and give a vision for the future of individualized dining. He’ll also give some insight into what challenges are ahead for companies trying to make personalized food (cough, consistency, cough).

Check out the Q&A below to get an idea of what Bodenheimer will be talking about at Customize — then get your tickets to hear him live in NYC! (Use code SPOON15 for that sweet 15 percent off).

Food-X is an accelerator for cutting-edge food tech startups. Have you seen an increase in interest in food personalization recently?
Absolutely. The number of companies that we see who are making personalization a core part of their business differentiation is through the roof. Of course, that makes it harder to lean on it as a key point of differentiation, but at the same time, there are so many different ways to approach it that every time I look at a new company there seem to be unique wrinkles to their specific product. 

What are some interesting approaches you’ve observed companies taking to capitalize off this trend?
We’ve seen people using big data, personal preference, genetic data, the latest medical literature combined with personal data, and so many other ways to provide product offerings that are designed to give each user their own optimal experience. In my opinion, the most interesting ones are those that are combining different sources of data to provide better context and products that match better with consumer demands. For example, we’ve seen products where the end goal is to layer genetic data, with specific types of consumer preference data to provide highly tailored recommendations that are focused on both health and taste.  

What do you foresee as some of the main challenges for companies looking to capitalize on food personalization and/or food as medicine?
There is a fine line between saying you are going to deliver something, whether that is an experience or a health benefit, and being able to deliver it consistently. The challenge with keeping every unique consumer happy is just that — they are all unique. What works well for me, may or may not work well for you. This coupled with the ever changing scientific literature can be more challenging as companies scale and need to have a supply chain that is reliable and flexible.

How do you envision the future of personalized dining evolving over the next five years?
More choices around both the food products and the delivery mechanism for those products. This means more services that allow people to better understand their unique physiology, genetic predisposition, and then for companies to provide more products that help them easily optimize their nutrition. What forms that will take is going to be interesting to guess at, but I’m confident that in 5 years we’ll have more choices while at the same time having to make fewer choices without data. 

Use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off your tickets for Customize — they’re going fast! We’ll see you in NYC.

Kroger Is Testing ‘Food as Medicine’ With Food Prescriptions for Customers

Kroger is testing a new concept where doctors can write food prescriptions their patients then fulfill at one of the grocery chain’s stores with the help of a Kroger Health professional, according to an article from Supermarket News.

The pilot launched last spring in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati, OH. In its current form, diabetes patients work with a local physician who makes dietary recommendations they can then take to a nutrition expert at a Kroger in Forest Park, OH. The prescription itself is actually just a shopping list of food items that have been tailored to the patient’s specific medical condition.

But as Bridget Wojciak, RDN/LD, a nutrition expert at Kroger, told Supermarket News, the program is much more comprehensive than a shopping list of food items. An in-store dietitian can make recommendations based not only on the food items on the prescription but also around the individual patient’s lifestyle, budget, and skill level when it comes to cooking. 

“We find that a lot of physicians give difficult-to-follow nutrition advice — along the lines of ‘You should improve your diet’ or ‘You should eat better.’ And that becomes very difficult for a patient to understand and implement,” she said, adding that a food prescription is a way to “fill the gap” between a doctor’s recommendations and the actual food customers will take home.

The program also involves using Kroger’s OptUP mobile app, which scores food items in the store based on their nutritional value and lets users track their progress when it comes to improving their diets over time. 

Kroger joins a growing number of companies across the food industry making products and services that address everything from lifestyle choices to dietary habits to chronic illness. Meal kit-like services, such as those from Epicured, are another tactic to getting healthier to consumers’ homes, as is prepared meal delivery from virtual restaurants that focus on food as medicine.

Food prescriptions filled at grocery stores provide a unique and arguably more enticing introduction to the food-as-medicine concept because they can be tailored to an individual’s needs and preferences when it comes to food, cooking, and dietary preferences.

For now, Kroger Health is focused on diabetes patients but could eventually expand to include other conditions, such as cancer and heart disease. And one can easily envision a future where Kroger is able to use its muscle in the grocery delivery area to fulfill food prescriptions and deliver the items to patients who may not be able to leave the house due to illness. 

Nor does the concept and Kroger Health have to be restricted to treating illness. Though rather a broad term, food as medicine can also be as much about preventative care as it is about treating existing illness and chronic disease. Kroger doesn’t yet offer prescriptions for those looking for more preventative food solutions. However, given the chain’s focus of late, which has included launching its own line of plant-based products and putting vertical farms in stores, that day is probably not too far off in the future.

Wojciak will be speaking at Customize, The Spoon’s upcoming daylong summit on food personalization, in just a few weeks in NYC. Grab your tickets to the event here.