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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

nutrition

SKS 2019: How Can Tech Break Down Barriers to Get More People in the Kitchen?

At the Smart Kitchen Summit we bring together innovators who want to make the kitchen more high-tech, connected, and futuristic. But what does that matter if it doesn’t actually get people in the kitchen and cooking?

That’s exactly the question that the first panel of SKS 2019 tackled onstage last week. Nancy Roman, of the Partnership for a Healthier America, Beth Altringer, of Harvard, and celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor spoke with The Spoon’s Michael Wolf about how we can build a bridge to the future of food and cooking. Without alienating people.

Onstage Roman emphasized that the kitchen of the future should have one goal: building a healthier population. One way to do that is to make it easier for people to cook simple, nutritious meals at home — be it with a new cooking app, a recipe platform, or something else entirely.

For Dr. Altringer, the kitchen of the future isn’t all rosy. In fact, she showed data that suggests outsourcing more and more cooking processes to automation or other convenience measures doesn’t necessarily equate to happier eaters. “People enjoy food more when they know they worked for it,” she said onstage. One way they might cook and enjoy it is by employing her Flavor Genome Project, which is gamifying food preparation to help consumers and chefs figure out better dishes and fix flops.

With all this talk of automation, you’d think that a career chef like Sanjeev Kapoor might be worried about what the kitchen will look like down the road. Instead, he’s excited about it. “It’s an opportunity,” he said onstage. For example, Kapoor leverages social media to reach more viewers and leverages tech to help feed 1.8 million kids per day for his nutrition outreach project.

Overall, it was a really fascinating way to kick off the summit, and a departure from some of the typical conversations you hear around the future of food. If you’re interested in how tech can help us eat better, you can listen to the full video below! Keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way over the next few weeks.

SKS 2019: Building The Bridge To The Future of Food & Cooking

SKS 2019: Naveen Jain Thinks We’re 5 Years Away from Making Sickness Optional

Back in 2010, entrepreneur Naveen Jain co-founded Moon Express, a privately held company gunning for the Moon. “When you have literally taken the moon shot, what do you do for an encore?” he asked the audience at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019.

For Jain, the answer was, tackle healthcare. (No big, right?) To do so, he started personalized nutrition company Viome in 2016. Last week Jain told SKS attendees that he believes we’re just five years away from making sickness “optional.”

If you want to hear Jain’s vision for curing some of society’s most persistent diseases, you can watch the video of his conversation with moderator Brian Frank at SKS 2019 below. But for you impatient folks out there, the (very) short solution to curing chronic disease is to eat better.

Easier said than done, of course. You may think you know what “eating healthy” means — greens, lean proteins, etc. — but as Jain says, “What is healthy for one person is actually maybe toxic for someone else.”

Jain gives an inspiring argument for why we should all take a much closer look at what’s going on in our gut, and why personalized nutrition could help make disease a thing of the past. Check out the video below to hear why and keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way!

SKS 2019: The Power of Personalized Nutrition

Impossible Foods Practices Right Jab, Warming Up for More Attacks against Plant-Based Meat

Early last week Rachel Konrad, the Chief Communications Officer for Impossible Foods, published a fiery rebuttal against Mom’s Across America (MAA)‘s recent article that stated Impossible Burger tests 11 times higher for Glyphosate weed killer than Beyond Meat burgers. Impossible’s clap-back was impassioned, to say the least; Konrad used the words “charlatans” and “quackery,” among others.

MAA is a vocal opponent to GMOs and is against Impossible’s use of genetic engineering to make heme, the ingredient that gives the plant-based burgers their bloody taste and hue. Claims about weed killer are questionable at best, and the whole post (and Konrad’s response) is arguably something of a footnote in the grand scheme of plant-based meat. However, both highlight an important point: Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and other alt-protein companies will have to prepare themselves for a lot more of these sort of attacks in the coming months and years.

Both companies have enjoyed relatively little pushback up until this point. They’ve been getting glowing publicity, locking down buzzy new fast food partnerships, and Beyond blew past already high expectations with their wildly successful IPO.

However, as these companies become more successful, they compete with bigger and bigger players. In the future, Impossible and Beyond will have to look out for attacks from organizations with a lot more reach and funding than MAA.

Big Beef, for one, has made it quite clear they don’t approve of companies branding plant-based products as “meat.” Organizations like the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association or the National Chicken Council have even tried to ban vegetarian burgers, sausages and the like from using the word “meat” on their labels.

In some ways, Big Meat’s reaction is unsurprising. Plant-based options for dairy and meat are projected to take over 10 percent of the $1.4 trillion global meat industry over the next decade. That’s a lot of pressure for Big Meat to live up to, and not all of those companies are going to pull a Tyson or a Cargill and invest in their own disruption.

It’s not hard to guess traditional meat companies’ lines of attack. They’ll likely frame plant-based meat as “unnatural,” “unhealthy,” and full of suspect ingredients. In short: fake news — er, meat.

So far, it seems like Impossible has come out swinging — perhaps a little too hard, at least in the case of Konrad’s Medium post. Hopefully Impossible and friends can find a sustainable way to deal with the quackery from Big Meat and their friends, because it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

HowUdish Says It Helps You Eat Like a Pro Athlete, but Fumbles on the Execution

A couple years back, Dwayne Johnson revealed his diet: 10 pounds and 5,000 calories of high-protein meals per day. Perfect for building muscle, not so great for the world’s supply of cod. I know that I’m never going to be as huge as The Rock, but there is a hopeful part of me that thought if I hit the gym enough and follow his diet, I could get jacked (bro).

It is this type of aspirational meal planning that got me intrigued by HowUdish. The iOS mobile app is one among many nutritional apps out there, but its hook is that it has enlisted real-life pro athletes to share how they eat. There is the pro football player Brandon Marshall, Bobby Portis of the Washington Wizards, wrestler Jordan Burroughs, MMA’s Cat Zingano, and track and field’s Queen Harrison.

I spoke over the phone with HowUdish Founder, Michael Gayed, who explained these pros are supposed to share the meals they eat both at home and at restaurants as well as nutritional/fitness advice via paid channels on the app. HowUdish users can access this “pro dish” guidance for just $4.99 a month. According to a HowUdish press release announcing the pro feature’s launch in February of this year, these athletes are supposed to post “regularly about their pro-dish-style on their social media accounts and within HowUdish itself.”

Evidently “regularly” is a relative term. I downloaded the app and subscribed to CrossFitter (yeah, i do CrossFit, don’t @ me), Dani Speegle’s channel. But she actually hasn’t posted an update to HowUdish in at least a month. And even then, she’s only posted three times ever: one restaurant recommendation, one actual tip for making a breakfast burrito, and one reminder to log and track your food. Bo-ring, and not really that useful, especially for $5 a month. Thankfully, I was still in the free trial phase for the app, otherwise I would have felt ripped off.

I can’t confirm how prevalent those type of anemic athlete posts are because you can only subscribe to one pro at a time, and you can’t look at what the other pro athletes are posting. Also, I didn’t see a place to unsubscribe from the one pro I’d chosen so I could have a do over. I’d have to cancel and start again.

I’ve only used HowUdish for a couple of hours, but these types of severe limitations don’t bode well for it having a permanent place on my phone’s homescreen.

I followed up with Gayed who said that unfortunately, the sponsorships were done through a third party, so he doesn’t have too much control over when an athlete posts to his app, but he reassured me that other athletes like Jordan Burrows post more regularly. Gayed also confirmed that there currently isn’t a way to unfollow or change pros in the app, though he said that a fix for this was coming in about three weeks. UPDATE: After the publication of this article, Gayed reached out to say that Pro athlete posts were just a part of their offering, and that the service will match a restaurant meal in your area to what that pro athlete would eat, so you can find food that matches your diet.

Gayed said that HowUdish currently has about 30,000 registered users, but it was “still too early to tell” how much of a boon these pro athletes would be for the service. This pro post inactivity, in part is why Gayed is trying to pivot and make HowUdish more of a service that connects people one-on-one based on their nutrition. Kinda like a Tinder for eating. These features still haven’t launched, but the idea is if you are a high-protein eating person, you could connect with another high-protein eating person and the app would pick a high-protein restaurant you could meet at.

I’m old and married, so I could not have less of an interest in this type of service. But people are potentially finding love from inside their fridge, so what do I know? Maybe healthy-eating millennials would like it.

I’m disappointed that the app didn’t work as well as I had hoped when it came to following pro feeding advice. I could actually see people with high hopes subscribing to a service where a pro athlete walked them through meal prep and planning for a week. But HowUdish isn’t that. So for me, it’s back to smellin’ what The Rock is cookin’.

Viome Raised $25M for its Microbiome-based Dietary Guide Platform

Speaking with Viome CEO, Naveen Jain, it’s not hard to understand how investors, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures among them, handed Viome a fresh round of $25 million in funding last week.

During our chat by phone, Jain was animated, proclaiming that it was a big week for him not because his company has now raised $45.5 million (and wants to raise $100 million in this Series B round) but because life is, in his words, “amazing!” and his company was working to make becoming sick a choice.

The company does this by collecting a stool sample from you (which you mail in) and running it through its software platform to analyze what microbes in your gut are doing to the food you eat. How your microbiome is treating your food can indicate what diseases you might be susceptible to, according to Jain. From there Viome applies AI to its findings to develop individualized dietary guidelines. Viome says there is no universal diet. Spinach, for example, might not be healthy for everyone because of the way your body processes it. By doing all this, Jain and company claim, Viome can help people avoid getting diseases like diabetes, or irritable bowel syndrome or even insomnia and depression.

The company’s claims and services aren’t without skeptics, even Jain himself has a controversial past. But that evidently didn’t keep investors at bay, and Jain says that Viome has a dozen clinical trials with various universities, labs and hospital networks to show the efficacy of his company’s service.

Viome has been on a bit of a roll this year. Back in February, the company acquired personalized nutrition service, Habit, from Campbell’s (terms were not disclosed). Habit’s original business was creating personalized recipes based on a person’s biomarkers. These types of personalized recipes, according to Jain, were a natural fit for Viome. In addition to recommending specific foods based on the biome, the company could recommend whole meals. Though Jain didn’t bring it up, it’s not hard to see Viome taking it one step further in selling personalized meal kits to people at some point.

But first, Jain said the biggest challenge for his company is generating awareness. He said the new money will go towards acquiring new customers, which will in turn provide more data that will make its service more useful. Additionally, Jain said Viome is working on a new type of test that only requires a finger prick of blood. This, by an unfortunate bit of timing, sounds a lot like Theranos.

Applying technology to your microbiome is definitely a trend. Other players in the space include uBiome, Day Two and Second Genome. Whether or not all of these solutions actually work and are something to get as excited as Jain about, remains to be seen.

Snap a Pic, Log Your Meal. Bite.AI Offers API for Visual Food Tracking

One of the best tips for getting healthy and losing weight is to log the food you eat. Unfortunately, food logging is also onerous. Food journals are inexpensive, but it’s easy to forget to log everything and even if you do, paper or spreadsheets don’t connect to nutritional information. Apps that scan barcodes make it a little easier, but that doesn’t work when you’re at a restaurant.

Bite.ai is looking to remove those pain points by using computer vision to do all the work of recording what you eat and automatically providing nutritional information. It’s basically a photo food journal that tracks 47 nutrient information points (calories, fats, carbs, etc.) and helps you use that data to reach dieting or other health-related goals. The app is free and currently has roughly 150,000 users, according to Bite.ai Co-Founder and CTO, Michal Wolski. You can see it in action in this video.

Bite.ai Food Logging app in action

As you can see from the video, we aren’t quite living in a fully automatic, sci-fi world quite yet. You take a picture and Bite.ai brings up food suggestions that you confirm, but you still have to enter how much of something you’re eating. As with most things AI, the more you use it, the more you’re training the algorithms and the better/more accurate the app will get.

Wolski says the plan is to keep the consumer app free and generate revenue through a B2B play. Bite.ai offers an API for other apps to use Bite’s computer vision and analysis platform. Wolski said that Bite currently has about a dozen customers using the APIs and integrating Bite’s technology for wide ranging purposes such as interactive marketing campaigns, glucose monitoring, weight loss and even research studies currently being conducted at two universities.

Bite is by no means the only company looking to use computer vision to make food logging easier. Calorie Mama offers a similar service, and was integrated into Samsung’s Bixby AI platform. And last year Microsoft was awarded a patent for “Food Logging from Images.”

Going up against giants like that, Bite.ai certainly has its work cut out for it, especially considering the company is currently bootstrapped. However, everyone eats, so the visual food logging space doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. If Bite’s technology performs, it can take its own bite out of the health and wellness market.

Journey Foods Leverages A.I. to Make Healthy Gummies (Huzzah!)

One of the hard parts of being an adult — and there are many — is that gummies are no longer considered an acceptable afternoon snack. But today Journey Foods is unveiling a sort of reimagination of the fruit snack; one which is packed with nutrients and also promotes biodiversity.

The Chicago-based startup launched about 18 months ago, though the inspiration goes back much further. Founder and CEO Riana Lynn, who had previously started a food traceability company and served as an entrepreneur in residence at Google, got the idea for Journey Foods after she spent a stint traveling around the world. Inspired by the widespread biodiversity she saw (and tasted), Lynn decided to bring some of her most nutrient-rich findings — like baobab and seaweed — back to the U.S. and transform them into healthy snacks. 

The first product is the aforementioned fruit snacks, which Lynn calls “Micro-Foods.” Not only does that sound more legit than “gummy candy,” the name also communicates the caliber of nutrition research and technology that goes into Journey Foods’ products. “We are more of a hybrid biotech/CPG company,” Lynn told me over the phone. “I guess you could just call it food tech.”

Tech indeed. The company has three patents pending on the nutrition biotech that powers their products. They’re also testing out different sugar technologies, so people with dietary restrictions can still eat the Micro Foods.

The fruit chews, which come in Strawberry Chia Seed and Mango and Cayenne Spice, cost less than $1.50 per single-serve pack, which is slightly more expensive than many natural fruit snacks — but not much. “We’re really focused on accessibility,” Lynn told me. Journey Foods will make the bulk of their money from B2B sales and custom product creation for big CPG companies.

As of now, the Micro-Foods are available on Amazon and the Journey Foods website, and are being tested in 80 retail locations around the country. They’re also in a variety of corporate offices, and Lynn told me they’ll debut the Micro-Foods in select hospitals later this year.

Journey Foods also has a B2B product development tool called JourneyAI. It’s essentially an AI-powered database that helps the startup identify and catalog ingredients which could be used to make nutrient-dense foods, speeding up the trial and error of product R&D with their third-party CPG partners.

Journey Foods’ chews take advantage of a few food trends in one fell swoop. First of all, they’re capitalizing off of growing consumer demand for healthier foods, specifically snack foods. The global healthy snacks market was valued at more than $23 billion in 2018, according to Grand View Research, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Consumers are also getting more adventurous in their snacking, looking for new, exotic flavors. Finally, adding the buzzword “biodiversity” to their marketing, legit as it is, could help Journey Foods capture more ethically-motived consumers.

The decision to target B2B partners is also a smart play, specifically in hospitals and tech company offices. At the former, the Micro-Foods could help patients, specifically kids, get the nutrients they need. And at tech offices, which are renowned for their gigantic snack walls, Journey Foods can offer a healthier alternative to, say, gummy bears.

Lynn told me that next, Journey Foods will add new flavors to its lineup of Micro Foods products, incorporating ingredients like marine greens, probiotics, and vegetables. Down the road, the company will launch new nutrient-dense products outside the gummy realm. Journey Foods is currently in the midst of a fundraising round, with participation from Backstage Capital and other VC firms. The startup was also the first chosen to join the Soylent Innovation Lab earlier this month and was awarded a $15,000 grant and office space in L.A. Hopefully that translates into a lot more gummy chews that we don’t have to feel guilty about.

Suggestic Brings Personalized Nutrition to Your Fingertips

As we all know, it’s easy to decide to eat healthier — but sticking to your diet plan can be very tricky indeed. That’s where, Suggestic, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October, comes in. The young company is leveraging technology to help users outline individualized meal plans, then connects them with recipes, grocery stores, and restaurants to help them stick to it.

Read our Q&A with co-founder Shai Rozen to learn a little more about how Suggestic hopes to make the world healthier through personalization, augmented reality, and some serious focus. Then get your tickets to see him pitch live at SKS!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Rozen: Our goal at Suggestic is to guide consumers through personalized nutrition journeys towards their individual health goals.

With our unique service, users can forget about reading, counting and memorizing to figure out what is best to eat. They don’t need to sort through the huge amount of misinformation about what foods are “healthy” for them. We provide each person with the ease of mind that they are doing the right thing at all times, delivered conveniently at their fingertips.

Our App is backed by powerful and proprietary AI, which delivers precise recommendations of what to order at a restaurant, what to buy at a grocery store and what to cook at home, and then tracks user progress to adjust each suggestion.

Users can select a free dietary filter, or subscribe to one of our premium programs curated by renowned health and nutrition experts.

What inspired you to start Suggestic?
My co-founder and I have both seen firsthand the devastating effects improper nutrition can have, but we’ve also seen the power of food as a means of health. We both saw our fathers pass away from type 2 diabetes-related complications and we both managed to revert our own pre-diabetes through nutrition.

Our mission is to help shift healthcare from treatment of symptoms to primordial prevention through “precision eating.”

And we don’t just want people to be “healthy”. We want each individual’s health optimized rather than just reduced to an asymptomatic average.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
The possibilities! There’s so much that can and needs to be done in the world of food tech that honestly the hardest part is deciding where to invest our efforts, and how to keep focused on what matters most.

Also, when you have a mission that’s also social and positive in nature, it’s pretty amazing how many people just want to help. It’s truly inspiring. But it can easily be a distraction as well, so focus is key.

How will Suggestic change the day-to-day life of its users?
We already do, everyday. By helping our users make the best possible food choices at any moment in time we have a direct impact on their health and wellbeing.

Q: What’s next for Suggestic?
The future looks great. We have scheduled over a dozen new premium program launches with our partner authors and experts for 2019, and also have new integrations coming up with lab tests that will allow our users to further optimize their individual health journeys. And we are also working on an Android version, as well as possible a stand-alone app for our Suggestic Lens (augmented reality) experience.

Thanks, Shai! Get your tickets to SKS to hear him pitch alongside 12 emerging food tech companies at our Startup Showcase this October in Seattle.

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat?

That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary preferences or restrictions (vegetarian, no dairy, allergic to peanuts). The app then recommends a series of dietary plans to match those preferences and goals, such as Anti-Inflammation or Low-Carb Mediterranean.

After selecting your plan, the app will create weekly meal plans with 3 to 4 recipes per day. “All recipes are found via machine learning,” Suggestic’s co-founder Shai Rozen told me over the phone. In fact, after they started the company four years ago, they spent the first year and a half applying for patents (which are currently pending) around their recipe-curating analytics. For a $100 annual fee, Premium members get access to food recommendations and recipes from selected health influencers. Users can turn their weekly meal plan into a dynamic grocery list, and Rozen said they’re working on making it shoppable.

Suggestic also provides videos and tasks to keep you on-track with your selected health program, a chatbot to guide you through meal and restaurant selection, plus a place for users to log their sleep quality and water intake. Its restaurant feature uses algorithms to analyze menu items at over 500,000 restaurants in the U.S., and will give each dish a score 1-10, depending on how well it’ll fit into your chosen diet. They’re also working on integrating genetic insight with DNA sequencing service Helix.

But the coolest part isn’t what they already offer — it’s what they’re working on. Suggestic is currently beta testing an augmented reality (AR) feature that allows users to point their phone camera at a menu and see color-coded indications of which dishes are best for their diet. “Then you can interact with the menu as if you were RoboCop or Terminator,” said Rozen. As of now, this service is available in 10% of the restaurants Suggestic covers.

It’s a little further out, but Suggestic is also developing tech to integrate AR into their grocery shopping service. So if you pick up a bag of gluten-free crackers and want to see how well it fits into your diet, all you’d have to do is bring out your smartphone and Terminator it.

The startup currently has a staff of around 20. Rozen told me that they have raised “around $3 million” over two funding rounds. The app launched about two months ago and has roughly 20,000 downloads.

AR is starting to pop up in more and more places throughout the food system. Huxley is combining AR, AI and machine learning to help increase indoor agricultural outputs. Big Food companies like Campbell’s are also exploring AR as a way to engage consumers from the grocery store to guided cooking, as is Williams Sonoma. Chinese startup Coohobo is using AR to make the grocery shopping experience easier and more social. App Waygo translates menus around the world into English, complete with pictures. And down the road, virtual reality (VR) in nutrition, cooking, and grocery shopping will be pretty common, too.

At the end of the day, Suggestic might be trying to do too much — they’ve got the buzzwords down (algorithms, AI, etc.), but combining them into a useful tool that can actually enable longterm healthy lifestyle changes will be a big lift.

That said, dining out can be a minefield for people with specialized diets or food restrictions; if Suggestic can nail the augmented reality aspect of their app and expand it to more restaurants, that could have huge benefits for those trying to watch what they eat.

 

Drinkable Meal Startup Ample Foods Raises $2M

San Francisco-based nutrition startup Ample Foods announced today that it has raised an additional $2 million in funds for the seed round, led by the VC firm Slow Ventures. The company has received previous investments from 500 Startups, Hawkshead Capital and Compound. In 2016, Ample raised $370K on Indiegogo, making it the site’s top-funded nutrition campaign of all time.

Ample CEO Connor Young founded Ample Foods to help his friends working long hours at startups eat healthy, convenient meals which didn’t require any planning. And planning they truly do not need. The drinks come in powdered form, so all you have to do is add milk or water and shake. Which means that Ample’s meals don’t expire like other liquid meal replacements; all but one of the varieties have 10-month shelf lives, with the vegan option lasting for 8 months. So you can keep one tucked into your desk at work for when you need to work through lunch, or even bring it with you on an airline (they’re TSA compliant). 

Each bottle is 400 calories and contains 25 grams of protein, 2 to 6 grams of sugar and 10 to 15 grams of fiber. They contain whey protein and collagen from grass-fed cows (except for the vegan version), probiotics, carbohydrates and healthy fats from nuts, chia seeds, and coconut. They also feature some more obscure ingredients, like organic Jerusalem artichoke insulin and acacia fiber. All drinks are gluten-free, soy-free, and non-GMO. 

In addition to their original product, the startup also offers Ample V, a vegan option which skips the whey, collagen, and honey, and Ample K, which is aimed at low carb, high fat ketogenic diet followers.

With these two options, Ample is hoping to cash in on two dietary trends: ketogenic and plant-based. “We wanted to make sure we hit not just a different market with each drink, but a different use case,” said Young. “We don’t do one-size-fits-all nutrition.” Orian Research estimated that the value of the global ketogenic food market was $5.07 billion in 2017, and forecasted it would grow to $6.5 billion by 2023. At the same time, demand for plant-based foods has been steadily climbing. 

Ample Original costs $6/bottle, with Ample V and Ample K priced at $7 and $8 each, respectively. (Prices reduce slightly if you buy in bulk.) That’s roughly double the price of Soylent, though I suppose those acacia fibers don’t come cheap.

The meal replacement business has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Soylent recently expanded its retail operations through a partnership with Walmart (despite a few obstacles last year with recalls, leadership changes, and getting banned in Canada). Meal-in-a-bottle Bear Squeeze, which is both ketogenic and vegan, broke records for first-day funding on Indiegogo (they have yet to ship). And a few months ago bone broth supplement company Ancient Nutrition raised $103 million. These types of drinks cater towards health-conscious people working long hours, who don’t have time to stop for a meal (much less cook one) but still want to have a balanced diet. 

“We’re selling to really busy people who care about health,” Young told The Spoon. “No matter how much they care, it’s difficult to keep up with the latest dietary trends. We’re simplifying the process from a product level.” He also told me that they hope to introduce a heavier focus on health and nutrition knowledge as they grow.

The latest investment brings Ample’s total funding to $4 million. If you want to try it out, or stock up for the inevitable zombie apocalypse, you can purchase Ample’s powdered drinks on its website.

Personalized Nutrition Analytics Platform Nutrino Raises $8M

Yesterday Nutrino, the Israeli personalized nutrition company, announced the completion of its $8 million Series A funding round. Nielsen Ventures, Pereg Ventures, and Gandyr Group joined existing investors, including the New York Angels group, who led the company’s seed round. This latest raise brings their total capital to $10 million.

Founded in 2011, Nutrino synthesizes information from scientific reports, menus, and food nutrition breakdowns and matches that to data points on your health and eating habits, which it gets from wearables, health apps, or information you input directly into their Nutrino app. It feeds all this information into FoodPrint, their analytics platform, which then uses machine learning and AI to create an individualized nutrition profile and personalized dietary recommendations.

Nutrino isn’t the only company out there offering personalized nutrition. Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Sage Project, a platform which breaks down nutritional information for a variety of products and will soon offer individualized dietary recommendations. Habit uses personalized nutrition information to create customized meal kits. And last year, Amazon partnered with EatLove to offer meal planning and recipes tailored to personal health profiles.

Photo: Nutrino blog.

Two things seem to set Nutrino apart. First is its specialization in curating dynamic nutrition profiles for people with diabetes. In 2016 Nutrino launched a partnership with Medtronic, a producer of continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, to help people with diabetes better customize their diets. Users could sync their monitors and pumps to the Nutrino app, which would use data from the person’s glucose and carbohydrate levels to offer food suggestions. They can also use the app to scan grocery barcodes and get a nutritional breakdown of each item, or, if they’re in one of the 200,000 restaurants that fits with Nutrino’s technology, get personalized menu recommendations based on their glucose and carbohydrate levels.

Which, if you’re someone suffering from diabetes, is critical. There are an estimated 415 million people around the world living with diabetes, and the number is expected to grow to 642 million by 2040. Managing diets is a key part of staying healthy with the disease, and Nutrino’s responsive app seems like a helpful tool.

The second thing that sets Nutrino apart from other personalized nutrition platforms is its food database, which collates information on the eating habits of its millions of users. Companies in food & beverage and fitness use this data to shape their products and marketing strategies. So Nutrino doesn’t only serve individuals; it also uses their data to market its services to companies who want more data on nutrition and consumer eating habits (though promises to protect user confidentiality).

Nutrino will use its funding to expand its database, grow its personalized nutrition services, and explore new partnerships in food analytics for diabetics.

Personalized nutrition and meal recommendations are getting a lot of buzz right now. And Nutrino’s recent funding raise seems to indicate that these trends aren’t going to slow down anytime soon.

Sage Project Uses Adorable Graphics to Break Down Nutrition Labels

When you’re in the grocery aisle deciding which type of crackers or canned tomatoes or granola to buy, you might check the label for nutritional information. Maybe you seek out the calories, the protein, or the fiber — but what does it all really mean? 

New York-based startup Sage Project is hoping to cut through the confusion with their nutrition data platform. The best part? It looks great doing it.

Started in 2015, Sage Project initially came out of CEO and co-founder Sam Slover’s research thesis at NYU in which he tracked his food intake for a year. During that time he realized that there wasn’t a tracking tool out there that was user-friendly and gave a helpful context to what you were eating. So Slover decided to create a nutrition platform that provided a lot of data points, but which also personalized the information and made it accessible — even to someone that didn’t have a nutrition degree.

What separates Sage Project from other services that quantify food’s nutritional value, such as Weight Watchers, is its level of contextualization. When you click on a branded product on Sage Project’s website, it will immediately give you a visually appealing nutritional breakdown, listing calories, protein, carbs, vitamins, and fat per serving. Which is what you would find on any nutritional label. But then Sage Project takes it further by giving information on where the product brand’s headquarters are, which diets it works well with, and other notable health aspects (gluten-free, vegan, etc).

Food items may also have something called “badges”. Which are sort of like Girl/Boy Scout Badges, but for health. For example, a pre-prepared bean and cheese burrito might get a badge for being certified organic, or a chocolate bar might earn a badge for having fewer than 5 ingredients.

“We’re not giving advice through the app,” said Sage Project Community Manager (and registered dietician) Georgia Rounder. “We’re providing information — and we want to provide it in a way that’s educational and fun.”

And fun it is. My personal favorite part of the site is a gif that shows how many minutes you would have to bike, run, swim, jump rope, do yoga, or dance in order to burn off the calories in one serving of your selected food. Which can be a little shocking (20 minutes of dancing to burn off one serving of crackers?!), but I didn’t mind. Because the visuals are just so. Darn. Cute.

“There’s a whimsical feel that sets it apart from other nutritional services,” said Rounder. After poking around the Sage Project site for a while, I would have to agree; the platform presents a lot of information, but the clean layout and pastel colors (not to mention the animated foodstuffs) somehow make it not overwhelming. Which is especially important since Sage Project is providing nutritional data, which can feel pretty intimidating — especially if you’re trying to figure out how to eat within the guidelines of a diet like diabetes-friendly or ketogenic.

Sage Project currently sources its library of data directly from partner brands. So far it has relationships Whole Foods, Kroger, Walmart and more. In the future they hope to expand their partnerships and work with a lot more macro and micro brands, growing their offering until, presumably, they catalog every product on the market.

In fact, the privately funded company has quite a few plans for expansion. In the next month or so, the startup will be rolling out a bigger, more comprehensive platform, as well as a mobile app. The new platform will have a new name (which Rounder said she couldn’t reveal), new features, and will expand on old features. It will also let users get a lot more personalized with their diets. For example, if you’re trying to eat a kidney-friendly or vegan diet, you can let the platform know and it will tell you if each food you select is a good pick or not.

It won’t only be for people trying to follow particular diets, however. Users can also create an individual dietary profile if they want to make it even more customized.

But the most critical aspect of Sage Project’s update will be the addition of a mobile app. In fact, without a mobile app component, Sage Project is basically just a cute novelty tool; a fun way to look up particular food products, but not especially useful in the day to day.  Because if you’re shopping in a grocery store the last thing you want to do is pull up a website on your phone to get some nutritional context for chocolate-covered almonds.

The app will also give consumers a way to add new foods to the database. If they come across a product or brand that isn’t listed, users can take a photo of the label with the app and Sage Project will add its nutritional information. In the future, I could see the startup teaming up with a grocery delivery service (like Amazon, since Sage Project’s first brand partner was Whole Foods) so that users could shop for foods that were in line with their diet directly from their phone.

Jones told me that the Sage Project team is also working on image recognition. They hope that the app will be able to recognize what foods are on your plate so it can give you a nutritional breakdown of each separate ingredient or dish, plus advice on how they fit into your personalized nutrition profile.

Until that day we’ll have to settle for getting our nutrition breakdown for a break-dancing milk carton and a bicycling watermelon. I’m not mad about it.