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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food as medicine

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.

Nutrient App Lets You Create a Personalized Meal Plan and Order Groceries

Oftentimes, meal planning services only provide one piece of the strategic cooking puzzle. They’ll help you decide what recipes to make for the week, but you’re often left on your own figuring out what you already have in your pantry and fridge and doing the actual shopping for ingredients part.

Startup Nutrient is trying to make meal planning a more streamlined process — one that’s also tailored to your specific dietary goals. Users go to the Nutrient website or download the app. They’re prompted to fill in a short questionnaire to determine what sort of calorie intake and nutrients best suit their lifestyle and goals. The app also takes into account any dining restrictions (meat-free, etc.). Nutrient then generates a meal plan of healthy recipes, all of which are developed internally.

From there, users can either download a shopping list or buy them through online grocery service FreshDirect, which they can do without leaving the Nutrient ecosystem. The Pantry page also lets users input what’s in their pantry and fridge, so the app can omit ingredients you already have from shopping lists or suggest recipes featuring ingredients it knows you have on hand.

Founded in Prague, the startup recently moved to New York City to attend the Food-X Accelerator. In the U.S. Nutrient is piloting its technology with a small group of friends and family. When I spoke with Nutrient’s CEO Roman Kalista over the phone earlier this week, he told me it plans to launch in November in the New York City area where it will integrate with FreshDirect for grocery fulfillment and delivery. The company plans to continue operations in their native Czech Republic, where they still have around 1,500 users.

Nutrient isn’t the only meal planning service to integrate with online grocery fulfillment. In the U.K. Mucho works with grocery delivery service Ocado, and eMeals has partnered with Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and more for grocery fulfillment.

However, according to Kalista, their service is the only meal planning app that allows users to go through the entire process within the app ecosystem: finding recipes, grocery shopping, checking out, etc. He also said that many other services end up being super expensive because they do a poor job translating recipes into ingredient lists. Nutrient, however, promises to be so efficient with its shopping recipes that users can pay as little as $1.75 per serving for their groceries. The platform also breaks down price per serving so you can see how much your meals are costing.

For now, Nutrient makes money by adding a small markup to all of its groceries. As they grow across the country and add more grocery partners, Kalista told me they hope to switch the cost over to the retailer side.

It’s too early to tell if Nutrient can follow through on its promise to streamline the meal planning process. But the startup does hit on a few big trends we see a lot of at The Spoon: personalization, shoppable recipes, convenience, and food as medicine (which Kalista said they’ll incorporate more of in future iterations). Perhaps most importantly, Nutrient doesn’t lock users in. Unlike meal kits or certain recipe planning services, users can use the app for as often — or rarely — as they’d like.

After they finish the Food-X program, we’ll see if Nutrient can indeed deliver on its promise to be the all-in-one solution to meal planning.

Project Open Hand Aims to Make Food as Medicine a Key Tenet of Healthcare

Non-profit Project Open Hand (POH) announced today a new CEO and, with that, further plans to expand its mission of treating chronic illness with doctor-recommended foods.

The announcement itself is brief, stating only that the new CEO, Paul Hepfer, M.S., will be “instrumental in continuing to leverage and expand Project Open Hand’s relationships with government partners, health plans and providers, private funders, donors and volunteers.”

But it also puts the spotlight on the many initiatives the San Francisco-based organization has kicked off in the last few years to raise awareness around the larger role food needs to play in healthcare — particularly for underserved individuals.

POH specifically targets critically ill and vulnerable populations in the Bay Area. That includes those in need living with conditions like AIDS/HIV, diabetes, and cancer, as well as elderly and disabled people who don’t necessarily have access to healthy food. The organization started in 1985 as a grassroots response to the AIDs crisis, tackling the negative effects of malnutrition on terminally ill individuals. It has since expanded to include several different initiatives around getting people what it calls “medically tailored meals” — that is, meals built around the specific conditions, medications, and side effects that come with chronic illness.

According to the organization’s site, POH serves over 2,500 meals per day to seniors and persons with disabilities around San Francisco via its Community Nutrition Program, and POH claims access to these meals can lower risk of disease and cognitive decline. Those 60 years and over who are San Francisco residents, and those diagnosed with a disability, can apply. Upon acceptance, they receive hot meals free of charge at one of the participating San Francisco locations.

But it’s the organization’s Wellness Program that gives us a good look at where the food-as-medicine movement is headed. Those individuals who qualify (according to this list) can sign up for the program and get medically tailored meals as well as groceries, both for pickup or delivery. Nutrition counseling is also part of the package. The Wellness Program is different from the Nutrition Program in that it specifically targets those individuals living with illness and disease, including cancer, lupus, diabetes, and HIV/AIDs, among others.

Though it can be easy to be skeptical of the so-called wellness movement, POH has partnered with a number of different researchers, scientists, other not-for-profit groups, and government departments to back up its offerings. It’s also a founding member of the Food is Medicine Coalition, a volunteer association of nonprofit, medically-tailored and nutrition services. It has worked with University of California, San Francisco, to publish data on the health benefits of food as medicine, and the aforementioned Adults With Disabilities meal program is completely funded by The SF Department of Aging and Adult Services (DAAS).

To be clear: POH isn’t telling anyone to ditch their meds in favor of kale. But a growing number of companies, organizations, and government sectors are grasping onto the idea of proper nutrition as preventative care when it comes to illness and disease.

And even those with disposable income who don’t need outside assistance can benefit from the food-as-medicine movement, and the most common way to do that as of right now is through the food-as-medicine sector of the meal kits market. Yes, it will require picking through and bypassing meal delivery plans that seem to care more about your Instagram feed than your health.

But don’t dismay: there are numerous options out there that would qualify as medicinal meal kits. Be Well Eats delivers meal kits to your door compiled by a team of certified nutritionists and holistic health coaches, and led by celebrity chef Tricia Williams and NYC-based Dr. Frank Lipman. Meanwhile, over in Los Angeles, the Phood Farmacy operates a virtual kitchen that delivers “preventative” and “healing” foods to Angelenos.

While both those options would be out of reach financially for POH’s demographic, it’s encouraging to see efforts being made up across the spectrum towards making food a bigger part of the healthcare discussion. Ideally we would one day see a grassroots initiative like Food as Medicine teaming with these higher-end meal kit companies to deliver to a wider swath of the population. Perhaps part of Hepfer’s plans as CEO of POH will include finding ways for non-profits to team up with more consumer-focused companies to make healthier eating easier for all.