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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nourished

Elo Health Partners With Nourished For Launch of 3D Printed Gummy Supplements

This week, Elo Health, a personalized nutrition startup, announced they have partnered with UK-based Nourished to offer Elo customers an option to take their personalized supplements in gummy form.

The new partnership, which will allow Elo customers to replace up to 7 pills with a single 3D-printed gummy as part of a daily supplement regimen, is the result of a year and a half of collaboration between the two companies, according to Elo Health CEO Ari Tulla.

“We’ve been trying to find and build a better product for delivering the nutrients to people,” Tulla said in an interview with The Spoon. “Nourished has developed this unbelievably good modality of 3D printed gummy vitamins, and we’ve been working with them to formulate the ideal formulation based on the Elo Health AI.”

According to Tulla, while some of Elo’s customers are perfectly okay with taking multiple pills with a daily regimen, some would prefer a different delivery method for their supplements.

“Now they can take the equivalent of seven pills in one gummy,” said Tulla. “Seven layers equals seven pills. And we’ve worked with Nourished to dose them appropriately, so they actually have the same outcomes as the pills.”

Another new option to the Elo Health platform is the company is now allowing its customers to build their initial personalized supplement profile with a questionnaire instead of a blood panel. Initially, Elo required a finger prick blood sample to get a panel determining cholesterol, lipid, vitamin D levels, and more than a dozen other biomarkers. Understandably, some customers didn’t like the expense (up to $150 per test) or the discomfort of a blood test.

Tulla says the company’s AI model has optimized its platform so customers get similar outcomes with personalized supplements without an initial or ongoing blood testing.

“We have taken the learning from the last two and a half years and thousands of people who went through the funnel. And we’ve been optimizing the questionnaire to get very close to the same way we can get with a panel.”

For those who want to continue to use blood testing for an initial panel and on an ongoing basis, Elo will continue to offer them.

For Nourished, the Elo partnership continues the company’s momentum over the past year. This summer, the company announced they were entering Japan at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, and they are also in the market in the northeastern US, the UK, and Europe.

In the future, Tulla sees his company’s AI-powered personalized coaching and nutrition counseling.

“When you have a question about nutrition, you want to get the response right then and there. And that’s what the AI can provide. It can provide a dialogue that happens right then.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Ari in the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear from Ari in person, join us next week at the Food AI Summit.

Melissa Snover of Nourished on How 3D Printing is the Key to Personalized Food (Spoon Plus)

Since Nourished lies at the intersection of two burgeoning food tech trends — personalization and 3D printing — I reached out to Snover to learn more about Nourished. In our interview she clued me in on how they settled on 3D printing (fun fact: she actually invented the first ever 3D food printer!), why she’s not rushing to link up with DNA analysis, and sets the scene for a futuristic vision where your health is managed autonomously by wearables and home 3D printers.

It was a super cool conversation that gives real insight into where we’re at right now, both in the 3D printing and personalization spheres. You can read the full transcript of my conversation with Snover, complete with synced audio. I also excerpted some of the most noteworthy parts of our conversation below. 

This Spoon Plus Deep Dive conversation is available only to Spoon Plus subscribers. Purchase a Spoon Plus membership to get access to this exclusive content and much more.

 

It’s Personal: Nourished 3D Prints Vitamins Tailored Exactly to Your Needs

If you’re like me, when shopping for vitamins you might pick up whatever’s on sale. After all, vitamins are mostly one-size-fits-all, right?

British startup Nourished would very much disagree. The Birmingham, U.K.-based company is trying to shake up the supplement space by using 3D printing technology to create personalized vitamins made specifically for you.

First you answer a short questionnaire on the Nourished website describing your lifestyle, health issues and nutrition goals. Nourished’s algorithm then builds you a unique “stack” out of their 28 “nourishments.” (You can also build your own stack if you already know what ingredients you want.) The company then 3D prints bespoke, layered vitamins just for you out of vegan gel — which end up looking like rainbow gummy candy — and deliver to your door every month.

Why 3D print the vitamins? According to Nourished’s Head of Brand, Caitlin Stanley, manufacturing supplements via 3D printing opens up a whole new world of personalization possibilities. Typically, active ingredients that show up in vitamins — like ashwagandha and Vitamin A — interfere with each other when combined into the same capsule. However, by printing these ingredients on top of each other, Nourished can fuse them into the same bite-sized supplement.

Each Nourished box comes with 28 stacks meant to be taken once a day. The vitamins are individually packaged “to maintain efficacy,” according to Stanley, who added that the packaging is compostable.

Photo: Nourished

If there’s one thing that might put people off of Nourished, it’s the price. The service costs £39.99 (~ $51.00) a month, which is significantly more than your average vitamin bottle off the pharmacy shelf. However, the cost is on par with other personalized D2C vitamin services, like Care/Of.

When I asked about competitors, Stanley was adamant that Nourished is the only company out there right now creating a truly personalized supplement. Care/Of basically just aggregates a variety of pills into a single pouch, while Nourished actually combines all of the ingredients into a bespoke bite-size supplement made specifically for the individual.

Nourished just launched a little over six weeks ago, so it’s in the very early stages. Right now it’s only shipping in the U.K. However, Stanley told me that the company plans to head to the U.S. in 2020. The company has raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount and currently has a team of twenty-five.

Personalization is a hot trend in the food space right now. Consumers want all aspects of their diet tailored to their exact preferences, from recipes to drive-thru orders to the foam topping your craft cocktail. But when it comes to health and nutrition, customization should be “first and foremost,” said Stanley. We’ll see if Nourished’s 3D printing strategy can help them be first and foremost in the personalized vitamin space, too.

If you’re interested in what’s coming next in personalized nutrition, you’ve got to be at Customize. The one-day event in New York City will explore the world of food personalization throughout the meal journey. Grab your Early Bird ticket before they’re all sold out!