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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

personalized nutrition

This Japanese Snack Company is Selling Personalized Granola Based a Person’s Microbiome

Last month in Tokyo at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, we learned about a new personalized cereal offering from Japanese snack and breakfast food company Calbee. Called Body Granola, the product provides a personalized mix of prebiotics and cereal tailored to a customer’s microbiome, as determined by an at-home test.

Here’s how it works: Once customers sign up, they receive an internal flora (microbiome) stool sample test kit. They take the test and send it to Calbee’s testing partner, Metagin, for analysis. About six weeks later, customers can access their results via the Body Granola website. From there, they can order their personalized granola by selecting prebiotic ingredients that best align with the primary bacteria in their microbiome.

As shown in the video interview, these prebiotics come in the form of letter- and color-coded toppings that are mixed with Calbee’s base granola. While the granola itself isn’t mixed specifically for each customer, customers are guided to a limited number of options tailored to support certain types of microbiome microflora. They then mix the prescribed final cereal at home.

Several startups in the U.S. have rolled out personalized nutrition offerings based on microbiome DNA testing, resulting in customized meal plans or supplement subscriptions. However, none of the major CPG brands have ventured into microbiome testing or other personalized testing—let alone offered a subscription service for customized consumables like this.

Currently, the product is only available in Japan, but the company says it plans to expand to the U.S. and other locations in the future.

Calbee Body Granola - Personalized Granola

January AI’s New App Uses Generative AI to Predict How Food Will Impact Your Blood Sugar

If you’ve been diagnosed with a metabolic health issue, you might have used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) at some point to track the impact of your food intake on your blood sugar. However, as of March 2023, only 2.4 million people used a CGM in the U.S., and because of the relatively small adoption rate of this technology, the vast majority of folks with diabetes or who are in danger of metabolic health issues may not have access to real-time insights into what the impact different foods may have on their glucose levels.

January AI aims to change this with its latest innovation: a free app that performs predictive analysis on the impact of various foods on blood sugar. The company, which unveiled its newest tool at CES last week, has developed an AI-powered app that analyzes meal photos and offers users immediate feedback on glucose impacts, macros, and healthier meal alternatives.

January says its app uses generative AI to automatically generate accurate food titles and estimates of ingredients and ingredient quantities within complex meals.

“It uses three kinds of generative AI to tell you your blood sugar response,” said Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, speaking at The Spoon’s CES Food Tech Conference last week. “It uses our own generative AI for glucose, and then it uses a vision generative AI to pick what’s in the food, and then it uses that language model to give it a title.”

According to the company, its AI-driven predictions are based on millions of data points, including wearable data, demographic information, and user reports. The company says this approach enables the app to provide personalized glucose level estimates and insights, making metabolic health management more accessible and actionable.

“It’s as simple as scanning a food,” said Hashemi. “You can also scan a barcode. You can also do a search. And we can tell you all the macro, its total calories, how much fiber, protein, fat, and carbs it has. And we can also show your blood sugar.”

According to Hashemi, the company’s platform can be customized and trained for specific users by taking data from a wearable such as a smartwatch, a person’s glucose monitor, or even food logs. With that data, the app can create highly customized predictions around a person’s biomarkers and dietary preferences.

“One out of three people in America has pre-diabetes, and 90% of them don’t know it,” said Hashemi. “And one out of nine people has diabetes, and 20% of those people don’t know it. So blood sugar is something we should all be managing, but we just don’t know that we should.”

Given the increasing popularity of GLP-1 medications, my guess is that more Americans will start to consider how their diet affects their blood sugar in the coming years. And, even if they don’t use a glucose monitor or get a prescription for a medication like Ozempic, increased awareness will push many to use apps like this one to help them better understand how a given food will impact their blood sugar and overall health.

You can hear Hashemi discussing the app and showing a demo in the video below.

January AI CEO Talks About New Generative AI App at CES

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.

Innit & Google Cloud Offer Personalized Nutrition Recommendations For Those With Diabetes and Other Health Conditions

Innit, a startup that makes software to digitize the consumer meal journey, announced today it has teamed up with Google Cloud to offer a new software module to food retailers to enable personalized healthy eating recommendations to their online grocer customers.

The new offering, which will be available to customers of Google Cloud via the Google Cloud Marketplace, enables grocers and other companies to create personalized nutrition recommendations for customers with health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease.

According to the announcement, the module utilizes an algorithm that scores various meal plans based on the shopper’s needs and then offers recommendations for personalized nutrition to consumers looking to optimize for a variety of health concerns. The module also provides assistance with cooking and meal planning.

According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company increased its focus on health and wellness over the past year. They developed an app for Roche, one of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to help those with type 2 diabetes better manage their eating and meal planning.

“The Roche project allowed us to sharpen up a lot of the diet and health and science focus,” Brown said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “We worked with our science committee, worked with the doctors of the customer to put together a really good program that provides daily guidance to people that are struggling.”

After the Roche project, Innit saw it could take much of what it built and offer it to a variety of customers through its partnership with Google Cloud.

“We saw that there was kind of a big unsolved problem for actionable healthy eating,” Brown said. “So now we’re packaging that up together with Google and bringing that to all of the grocery retailers, as well as healthcare companies.”

The new offering expands on Innit’s relationship with Google, which got its start in 2018 with the addition of Innit functionality to their Google Home product. Google Cloud first offered Innit’s technology for personalized food recommendations through the Cloud Marketplace last year, and this latest offering gives food retailers and others the ability to add focused personalized nutrition plans for specific health conditions.

Innit has come a long way since the company’s early focus on developing guided cooking and smart appliance software for kitchen appliance manufacturers. The company’s acquisition of Shopwell in early 2017 kickstarted Innit’s move into shoppable recipes and personalized food data, and today the company describes itself as a personalized nutrition platform company. In many ways, this move by Innit is indicative of the broader move by smart kitchen software players to beef up their food commerce and personalized health offerings over the past few years.

When I asked Brown if Innit is still talking to appliance manufacturers about building solutions for their products, he told me that while these companies did slow down their digitization initiatives over the past few years as a result of supply chain and manufacturing difficulties related to COVID, conversations have begun to heat up again.

“There definitely was some industry slowdown, but we’re seeing it wake up again,” Brown said. “I’ve had multiple calls and new customer discussions with appliance manufacturers and so things are starting to wake back up.”

I Tried Viome’s Health Intelligence Test to Understand My Gut Microbiome and Biological Age

In recent years, the gut microbiome has drawn a lot of attention in the field of nutrition science for being able to tell us an extraordinary amount about our health. Viome, a personalized nutrition company founded by executive and entrepreneur Naveen Jain, offers at-home testing that allows users to get insight into their microbiome and overall health. As someone who is deeply interested in cutting-edge personalized nutrition, I was excited to try out one of Viome’s at-home testing kits.

Taking the test

Viome sent me its Health Intelligence Test, which measures stress response, biological age, and the health of your immune system, gut microbiome, cells, and mitochondria. Taking Viome’s at-home test is straightforward, and simply required both a blood and stool sample. The testing kit included all the materials needed to gather this, and supplied extra testing materials just in case you made a mistake during the collection process. I appreciated that the instructions were detailed but also easy to follow.

Once the stool and blood samples are gathered, packaged, and sealed, I just had to drop them off in a prepaid package at my local post office. Once the samples are received, Viome states that it takes about four weeks to receive the results, which is about the amount of time it took for mine.

Before you receive the results, you must take a lengthy intake survey in Viome’s user portal that asks questions about what you eat, how you sleep, stress levels, and other lifestyle questions. It took me about 40 minutes to answer all of the questions.

Background on my health

Prior to disclosing my results and experience with using Viome’s test, I think it is important to share my perceived health and lifestyle to give you more background. For the past eight years, I have followed a whole-foods, plant-based/vegan diet that incorporates a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains. I do yoga and walk every day, and rock climb multiple times a week. I get plenty of outside time because I hike, stand-up paddleboard, and forage for wild foods. I do not smoke, am not a heavy drinker, and have no chronic illnesses. I have rarely taken antibiotics in my life.

The results

In general, I consider myself to be a very healthy person and feel great most of the time. Therefore, I was surprised when I received my results.

Overall, my results were not terrible, but they were not great, and certainly did not meet my expectations. The results were graded on a scale from 0 to 100 (0 being the worst, 100 being the best), and the classification of being not optimal, average, or good.

How my mitochondrial health, immune system health, and stress response health were rated in my Viome portal

My cellular and mitochondrial health were classified as “not optimal”. My gut microbiome health and immune system health was rated as “average”, while my stress response health was “good”. I am 25 years old, but my biological health was considered to be that of a 21-year-old.

Within these larger categories were subcategories that were also graded. For example, within the “gut lining” category, there were other subcategories like butyrate production pathways and gut lining health.

The number of different ingredients recommended to me

One of the things that surprised me the most was that based on my results, the company recommended 56 different ingredients for me to supplement with. This included vitamins, herbs, minerals, food extracts, amino acids, prebiotics, and probiotics “we’ve identified to improve or help maintain your scores.”

Within the Viome portal, you can see what bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, and probiotics, are present in the “My Active Microbes” section. My test results show that my sample contained several viruses: Paprika mild mottle virus, Pepper mild mottle virus, Tobacco mild green mosaic virus, Tomato brown rugose fruit virus. These are plant diseases, so I did not understand why this showed up in my gut.

As I mentioned before, I eat a diverse whole-food diet, eat pro-and prebiotic foods, forage wild foods, and even brew my own fermented beverages. Despite my efforts to maintain a healthy gut, only one probiotic strain was identified in my sample and my active microbial diversity ranked low.

A few of the foods on the “minimize” list

The company recommends foods that you should avoid and minimize, and also foods that are considered “superfoods” for your body. My avoid list had five foods listed (tomato, paprika, alfalfa sprouts, bell pepper, and mung bean sprouts), while my minimize list consisted of nearly 80 different foods. My superfood list consisted of 17 different foods, including cabbage, apple, artichoke, and broccoli.

Understanding the results

I first felt overwhelmed and stressed about receiving my test results, and decided to share them with my primary care physician. After looking over my results she said she was not concerned at all, especially since I did not have any symptoms I was worried about. I asked her specific questions about why some of my scores were not optimal, and she said that was not her field of specialty, and in all honestly, she wasn’t even sure of who would be best to bring my test results to.

I then decided it would be best to speak with someone from Viome to discuss my results further. I was able to talk with Grant Antoine, a naturopath by training and clinical expert at Viome. The Viome test results are intended to be self-explanatory, and Antoine said, “They’re straightforward, and hopefully, you’re doing a lot of the interpretation on your own.” When I asked who would be best to take the results to for a deeper explanation, he stated that a nutritionist or health coach would be a good option.

I actually have completed my health coaching certification and felt that I still needed to take the results to someone who was more qualified than myself.

Personally, I felt as if supplementing with 56 ingredients is excessive, especially since as a young, plant-based, athletic female, I already take a decent amount of supplements. When I asked Antoine to elaborate on why this is necessary, he said that this recommendation is based on my results, questionnaire, goals, and scores, and then seeing where there might be an opportunity to improve my scores. The recommendations are based on the company’s artificial intelligence engine that calculates the best way to support your scores and gaps with food and supplement.

Purchasing 56 different supplements would be extremely pricey (and take up a lot of cupboard space), but Viome offers personalized supplements it creates for you based on your results. If I did want to follow these supplement recommendations, it would really only make sense to purchase from the company. Viome offers customized supplements for a monthly subscription fee of $150 per month, which includes all of the recommended ingredients.

When asked why I had plant viruses present in my gut, Antoine said that when we eat plants that contain these viruses, they can linger in our gut, potentially causing an immune response or affecting the gut lining. He also said, “What exactly they’re doing, how harmful they are, we don’t exactly know if I am being 100% upfront, but there are indications that they’re inflammatory.”

Conclusion

When I asked Antoine if anyone had perfect scores across all health categories, he said, “For most people, there’s, room for improvement. We do have some all-stars that come through and they’re green across the board. I would say that those are elite athletes; there are some superstars out there.”

After already spending years figuring out what foods I should avoid, and creating health and wellness routines that make me feel great, I have decided to not follow Viome’s recommendations. Even though my results were slightly alarming, Antoine said, “But you actually have a very good result. You have a really good report of your biological age. I consider that to be kind of like your overall report card grades.” Maybe if I did follow the recommendations and take the supplements, I would feel better than I could have ever imagined.

If you are interested in giving Viome’s Health Intelligence Test a try yourself, it is currently available on sale for $199 (It is normally $299). For $129 (normally $199), the Gut Intelligence Test can be purchased on its own.

Viome Launches At-Home Test Kits in Nordstrom

Personalized nutrition and health company Viome Life Sciences announced today that it will now offer its Health Intelligence Test in the department store chain Nordstrom. The wellness product will be a part of the store’s beauty category.

The test measures microbial, human, and mitochondrial gene expression through samples of blood and stool. As a result, insights are offered on the individual’s cellular health, biological age, immune system health, and gut health. The company claims that these insights can help someone better understand their digestion, energy levels, sleep patterns, skin, weight, and hormones.

While a precision health company selling an mRNA test in a fashion retailer seems unlikely, this news might signal that personalized nutrition is moving into the mainstream. Personalized nutrition is expected to change the way we eat, and the global personalized nutrition market is forecasted to grow from being $3.7 billion in 2019 to $16.6 billion by 2027.

When Viome founder and CEO Naveen Jain spoke with The Spoon earlier this year, he talked about how he’d invested heavily in automated production to scale the company’s personalized nutrition testing. With the deal with retailers like Nordstrom’s, it looks like that investment may be paying off.

“Precision nutrition is the future,” said Jain in the announcement. “This partnership is a giant step towards making our technology more accessible, so people can understand what’s right for their unique body.”

Viome isn’t the only company in personalized nutrition to offer an at-home testing kit. Genopalate uses information from DNA swabs to create personalized nutrition plans for the user. DayTwo focuses on the gut microbiome to provide customized diet recommendations, while Sun Genomics develops probiotics specifically for the user based on their gut health. According to Viome, it offers the world’s first at-home mRNA test that is commercially available.

Viome’s Health Intelligence Test is now available on Nordstrom’s website for $199 USD, and starting in 2022, will be stocked at select store locations.

Precision Nutrition Startup DayTwo Raises $37M

Precision medicine startup DayTwo announced over the weekend a $37 million fundraise for its app that provides users customized diet recommendations based on their gut bacteria. New investors participating include Poalim Capital Markets, La’maison Fund and Micron Ventures. They were joined by existing investors including the aMoon VC fund, 10D, and Cathay Innovation Ventures. To date, DayTwo has raised $85 million including this round.

The new funds will go towards Israel-based DayTwo’s technologies that help those with diabetic and metabolic diseases. In particular, the funds will go towards further enhancing the company’s first product, a platform that uses artificial intelligence, microbiome sequencing, and other clinical measures such as surveys to provide customized food prescriptions for users with these diseases. Doing so will help users manage their blood sugar levels, which is critical for those with diabetes. 

Speaking to the Times of Israel, Adi Lev, DayTwo’s deputy CEO for Research & Development, said that the new funds will allow the company to continue its research on the links between bacteria in our bodies and diseases. DayTwo will also continue to develop the algorithms that are an essential part of the company’s platform. 

Users access food recommendations and meal plans via the DayTwo app. In the U.S., they can also scan the barcodes on food to find out more about the item in question.

This kind of precision nutrition, as the name suggests, offers consumers more granular food recommendations and diet plans that are based on factors unique to each individual’s body. Instead of drawing on data from outside sources (e.g., a wearable fitness device), these programs and solutions gather data from inside the human body. Genopalate does this through DNA analysis, while Sun Genomics and Viome are a little more like DayTwo in that they focus on users’ microbiome.

DayTwo, however, is currently the only company of this pack with a specific emphasis on those with diabetes and metabolic diseases. Currently, the company’s platform has about 70,000 users across the U.S. and Israel. In the U.S., the DayTwo is working with large employers and health plans. In Israel, a collaboration with Clalit Health is underway and one with Maccabi Health Services is expected for the future. 

To Make Truly Personalized Nutrition Products, Naveen Jain Realized He Needed to Build a Robotic Factory

Back when we wrote about Viome for our DNA-based personalized nutrition report last year, the company primary product was a personalized nutrition plan based on what they had learned from the DNA and RNA of a customer’s microbiome. Viome would then use this information provide nutritional guidance and meal plans for the customer.

While this is valuable and markedly different from traditional nutrition planning, it’s still the largely the same in one significant way: Viome’s nutrition plans still required the user to then go out and assemble a hodge-podge of supplements at the store or through Amazon that would help them take action on the information in the reports.

Naveen Jain, the CEO of Viome, realized that was a problem.

“We will tell you that here are the nutrients that your body needs, and what we found was that there was no way to give people the precision nutrition,” said Jain in a recent interview on Clubhouse. “The problem was they contain 10 other things that went with that. And other nine things were actually harmful to you and only one was beneficial.”

“We couldn’t figure out how to actually tell you what you need, and nothing that you don’t.”

Jain decided that what his company needed to do was provide highly personalized vitamins tailored for each person individually. In order to do that, however, the company would need to solve a massive engineering question: How do you create personalized supplements tailored for a particular person’s biomarkers at scale?

The answer was to build a robotic factory.

“We decided what if we could create completely automated robotics, where every single capsule is made for each individual based on every ingredient that the person needs in the precise dosage.”

Jain emphasized how the precision created by automation was key to assemble tailored supplements with up to 75 different nutrients.

“We literally see ‘take from the bins 17 milligrams’ and ‘take from the bins 13 milligrams’ and we literally make those powder, encapsulate them and ship them on that date. This has never been done.”

Jain believes other companies that claim to offer personalized nutrition supplements today aren’t really personalized nutrition, but more just matching categories of supplements to consumers on a closest-fit basis. To build a truly personalized nutrition consumable product is a massive engineering challenge.

“No one has figured out how to do these things at scale,” said Jain. “And that was our biggest challenge to build this massive robotic form to do it at scale.”

I talked with Jain in The Spoon’s Clubhouse room, FoodTech Live, last week. If you’d like to listen in on these conversations live, make sure to follow us on Clubhouse. And of course, you can listen to this conversation and others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

And, as always, you can just click play below.

Founders of PeaPod Launch Sifter, a Grocery Site for People with Dietary Restrictions

The founders of one of the earliest online grocery sites, PeaPod, announced this week the launch of a new grocery platform called Sifter (hat tip: Grocery Dive). The new platform is essentially an online shopping cart that allows customers to put together grocery lists based on dietary preferences, allergens, and medical conditions, and send that list on to partner retailers for fulfillment.

On Sifter’s website, shoppers select different “SiftTags,” which allow them to select different dietary and allergen filters. If you are managing a health condition, like IBS or diabetes, for example, the site then populates items that are identified as acceptable for these conditions. The RecipeSifter feature on the site enables a customer to paste in the URL of different recipes, and the site will determine if the recipe is acceptable for your dietary preferences, allergens, medical conditions, etc. Sifter will then show all of the ingredients listed in the recipe, and allow you to add these items to your cart.

Once grocery items are selected on the Sifter’s site, the customer is then directed to the retailer’s site to complete the purchase. As of right now, Sifter has partnered with retailers like Stop & Shop, Giant Foods, Walmart, and Amazon to fulfill the grocery orders. Though, it should be noted, a single retailer might not be able to fulfill all of the items on a particular list.

Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the use of online grocery shopping has seen a spike, and it is predicted that by 2024 that online grocery shopping will be adopted by 55% of consumers in the US. Sifted is one of a crop of new companies looking to help people with dietary restrictions get their food. Through Dinner Daily, customers are offered personal meal planning and can shop for ingredients through stores like Kroger, Ralph’s, and Fred Meyers. eMeals partnered with Albertsons and Safeway to fulfill groceries needed for the meal recommendations it provides.

Sifter is available now throughout North America.

Video: Genopalate’s Sherry Zhang on the Past, Present, and Future of DNA-based Nutrition

If the first wave of precision nutrition was all about wearable devices tracking information like weight and exercise regime, the second wave relies on far more granular information about the individual. Companies can now (with a user’s permission, of course) pull and analyze information from our own DNA sequences and gut microbes to make food, health, and lifestyle recommendations based on actual biology, not third-party data. 

Genopalate is one such company helping this second wave of precision nutrition to rise. By analyzing a person’s genetic markers, Genopalate’s technology can understand how an individual’s body digests and processes foods as well as whether a person is predisposed to certain diseases.

Over a video session recently, Dr. Sherry Zhang, Genopalate’s founder and CEO, explained how these diet-gene interactions have shaped the whole of human biology and how we can leverage the information they provide to live healthier lives overall.

View the video below to catch our full conversation, in which we cover, among other things:

  • The role of diet-gene interactions throughout human history and biological evolution
  • How our DNA can determine our susceptibility to different chronic diseases (e.g., obesity, autoimmune disorders)
  • The kinds of data precision nutrition tools and services must analyze in order to understand biological needs at the individual level
  • How we can put that data to better use in order to help individuals change their health habits

As well, the goal of precision nutrition is in part to help the average person analyze the way they shop for, cook, and eat food. Our conversation below digs into how Dr. Zhang, Genopalate, and other companies working in the precision nutrition space are now making this level of personalization possible for our everyday diets.

The Spoon Conversation with Genopalate’s Sherry Zhang from The Spoon on Vimeo.

GenoPalate Raises $4 Million Series A for its Personalized Nutrition Platform

Personalized nutrition company, GenoPalate, announced yesterday that it completed a $4 million Series A round of funding. In the press announcement, the Milwaukee-based company said the new financing came from local investors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $5.7 million.

GenoPalate was founded in 2016 by Yi Sherry Zhang, Ph.D, who described the what the company does for The Spoon last year, saying:

Through a simple swab test, GenoPalate’s nutrigenetic home test analyzes 100+ genetic markers that determine a person’s specific needs for 24 vital nutrients such as carbohydrates, vitamin D, and sodium, and sensitivities to lactose, gluten, caffeine and alcohol. The company combines genetic results with millions of nutritional variables to recommend the foods a person should eat more of. Then each client receives a report that includes their genetic results, what they mean, and a personalized list of the 80+ foods that benefit that specific client the most. Using its genetics-based personalized nutrition technology, GenoPalate is changing how people choose, shop for and eat food for better health.

Former Spoon writer, Catherine Lamb tried GenoPalate for herself earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, saying:

What I found was surprisingly . . . unsurprising. I was told I should eat a diet that’s moderately high in carbohydrates, high in fiber, and has low levels of sugar and saturated fat (but is high in “healthy” fats). I’m likely lactose intolerant (can confirm: yep) and likely not sensitive to gluten. I’m a fast caffeine metabolizer and a normal alcohol metabolizer. I have gene variants that indicate I might need to consume higher levels of Vitamin A, E, and D, among others.

Personalized nutrition is certainly a trend we’re following at The Spoon, covering other players in the space such as Viome, Sun Genomics, Genopalate, DNANudge, DayTwo and Nylos. You can check out our market report How Microbiome and DNA-based Personalized Nutrition Will Change the Way We Eat on our Spoon Plus membership service for a deep dive on the personalized nutrition market.

Heali Launches its AI-Based Nutrition and Meal Planning App

Heali, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create more personalized nutrition advice and meal planning for people, announced today the beta release of its mobile app.

The Heali app helps people adhere to their choice of 30 different diets (Vegan, Low FODMAP, Paleo, etc.) through recipes as well as grocery shopping and restaurant meal selection guidance.

Heali uses a number of features to help people with their nutritional choices. It has optical character recognition (OCR) so a user can take a photo of a menu description or a product’s nutritional label and the app will understand what ingredients are in that item. There’s a barcode scanner for use on products at the grocery store. Heali also has a meal planner, which analyzes the nutritional makeup of hundreds of thousands of recipes, products and meals to provide its nutritional guidance.

But the Heali app isn’t just for people wanting to eat fewer carbs. I spoke with Heali Founder and CEO Kyle Dardashti last month, who explained that his app can also provide guidance for people with certain medical conditions. For example, if a user has Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), they can use the app when grocery shopping to see if products contain certain emulsifiers that exacerbate their condition.

Heali is part of the personalized nutrition/food-as-medicine movement, and there is certainly no shortage of players in that space. There are other mobile apps like Yes Health and Foodvisor, hardware devices like the Mixfit, and meal delivery services like Kaigo. All of these are looking to help you eat healthier.

When asked what separates Heali from all the other competitors in the space, Dardashti told me, “Others have taken 10 diets or so, they have their subset of recipes in their app. They’ve tagged those few hundred recipes for how it adheres to those 10 diets.” He added that Heali has “built the engine that can do it all programmatically. Now it’s not just one of 10 tags. It has been done programmatically with AI.”

This, according to Dardashti, makes Heali, the most personalized dietary engine on the market.

The proof, as always, will be in the (diet-approved) pudding. The Heali app is free on both iOS and Android, and those interested can join the waitlist. Beta users will be admitted in cohorts.