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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

personalized nutrition

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.

Food Tech News: Bee-Free Honey, Menu Items With Low Carbon Footprints

It was an exciting week in food tech with the annual SKS Summit happening earlier this week (if you missed it, check out the highlights of day one, day two, and day three). Outside of this week’s virtual event, a few other stories stood out to us, including bee-free honey, low carbon footprint menu items at Panera, Minnow partnering with two restaurants, and anti-stress nutrition bars.

Melibio is creating bee-free honey

Melibio is using microbial fermentation and synthetic biology to create honey without the use of bees. The process will mimic the process a bee would take to create honey and will use real flower nectar. Honey is often touted for its health benefits, and Melibio’s honey will contain small amounts of the amino acids, minerals, and enzymes found in real honey. The company plans on launching a product for food and beverage companies by late 2021.

Panera Bread releases climate-friendly labels on menu

Starting this week, Panera Bread’s menu will include “cool food” badges that signify which of its menu items have a lower carbon footprint. Around 55 percent of the chain’s existing menu items will have a cool food meal badge. Ingredients that are considered to have a low carbon footprint include vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. Medium carbon impact ingredients include fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, and poultry, and beef has the highest carbon footprint. Last month, Just Salad also released a Climatarian menu that shows menu items with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions.

Minnow launches pilot program in fast-casual restaurants

Minnow, the recent winner of the SKS Startup Showcase, launched a pilot program for its contact-free delivery and pick-up solution. The Minnow Pickup Pods will be located at Crisp Salads in Portland, Oregon, and bNatural Kitchen in New Haven, Connecticut. Similar to the design of an Amazon locker, the pods disrupt the use of expensive third-party delivery services like Doordash or Postmates. Additionally, the pods have a touchless interface for pick-up, and the cubbies are insulated to keep food fresh.

myAir releases stress-reducing nutrition bars

Tel-Aviv-based startup myAir makes nutrition bars infused with different herbal compounds to manage stress. The personalized nutrition company offers a short three-minute quiz on its website to determine a customer’s level of stress, and then the customer’s heart rate, sleep quality, physical activity is tracked through smartwatches. This data is then used to determine what combination of bars would be most beneficial for the customer. The gluten-free and vegan bars cost $3 each, and are available in flavors like Calm Green (infused with lemon balm extract) and Sleepy Gray (infused with hops).

Mixfit Debuts Its Second Generation Personalized Nutrition Device. Will Consumers Buy It?

Here at The Spoon, we’re big believers that personalized food and nutrition are going to be a big deal someday, so much so we had a conference on the subject in the ‘before times’ when people still gathered in large groups.

One of the big ideas we discussed at Customize, our food personalization summit, was how what we eat will eventually go from one-size-fits-all food to meals made specifically for each of our specific dietary and biological profiles.

This idea has already arrived in some ways in the form of 3D printed vitamins and DNA-driven diet plans, but products that make on-demand food tailored for our specific biomarkers and nutrition profiles at the point of consumption are still in their embryonic stages.

That said, one company by the name of Mixfit has been working on exactly this for the last few years. Mixfit makes a system that whips up personalized vitamin-packed beverages customized around a person’s nutrition profile as well as data from wearables or even photos they’ve taken of food on a given day.

The device works like this: It uses an app called MINA, where a user enters their nutrition profile and connects to wearables like Apple Watch for activity data. All of this information is then used to create a custom beverage recipe. When a customer wants a drink, they send their drink order to the Mixfit, which dispenses a mix of vitamins and flavors from different various pods in the form of a personalized beverage.

The company is launching its second-generation system this summer. Generation two will sell for $180, and the consumables, which consist of a mix of vitamin and flavor pods, come in the form of a $59 a month subscription.

I had a chance to check out the first-gen appliance, which is no longer available for purchase, at CES in January 2019. Here’s a shot of the inner chamber where the nutrient pods are inserted.

Mixfit (Gen 1) Vitamin Pods

While new hardware is always risky, Mixfit has the backing of large nutrition conglomerate DSM, which acquired a 50% ownership stake in the company in 2018. DSM will provide the vitamin and nutrient ingredients that come as part of the consumable subscription.

Will consumers go for the Mixfit? My guess is the product makes more sense in health clubs than on kitchen counters (the company plans to sell to both). Still, there might be enough consumers among the millions of households who spend significant amounts of money on nutrition products which jump at the chance to get custom-built beverages.

The biggest challenge for Mixfit will be consumer education. It’s a nuanced product that needs to shown to consumers, and so it needs a sales channel where the product is adequately demoed. One venue could be physical retail, but selling hardware like this is new for the nutrition business, so chains like Super Supplements or Vitamin Shoppe might not know what to make of the Mixfit. Another option could be TV-based shopping networks where the product’s capabilities can be adequately demoed to prospective customers.

Long term – think a ten-year time horizon – on-demand personalized nutrition will most likely be commonplace. The question is how exactly that nutrition will be delivered. Some, like Pablos Holman, thinks much of it will be in the form of 3D printed food. Others see AI as a big part of the picture.

But before we get to that science fiction future, we need products to help push us on our way. Mixfit is one of those early products. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if consumers are ready for that first step into the future.

Amazon’s Recipe Integration Bender Takes a Personalized Nutrition Turn With EatLove

Amazon’s on a recipe integration tear.

This week another Amazon partner unveiled yet another recipe integration, but this one has a personalized meal plan twist. EatLove, a service that offers meal planning and recipes tailored around personal health profiles has announced they are integrating with Amazon Fresh.

Just as with the Allrecipes integration we covered yesterday, EatLove has partnered with AmazonFresh to enable same-day delivery of groceries tailored around specific recipes. The personalized nutrition site takes information based on a profile filled out by subscribers and offers meal plans tailored by nutritionists, and now those meal plans can essentially be assembled and sent to your home by AmazonFresh.

In a way, the coupling of EatLove and AmazonFresh is similar to personalized meal kit offerings like those from Habit, only with EatFresh you aren’t actually sending in bodily fluids. For Amazon, it makes a lot of sense to jump on the personalized nutrition bandwagon, particularly as the company builds what looks to be a variety of meal-kit-on-demand services through different partners, essentially allowing them to tap into specific audiences with unique meal planning needs.

For companies like Eatlove, Fexy and Allrecipes, the Amazon recipe-delivery integrations also makes sense since it no doubt makes them more attractive partners for big brands. For meal kit companies like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and now Habit, this is yet another ominous shot across the bow from Amazon.

Personalizing Food, Directed by Your DNA

What if, at the press of a button, you could have food generated for you that is customized for your genetic code and up-to-the-minute nutritional needs? With that in mind, Dr. Amy Logan, a team leader for dairy science at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has just launched a three-year study into the personalized fabrication of smart food systems.

As News.com.au reports, Dr. Logan has delivered a presentation on how personalized nutrition will converge with 3D printing so that custom food will be generated based on measurements of physiological markers through biosensors. Think of how sensors on a car warn us when, say, tire pressure is low. In Dr. Logan’s eyes, biosensor-based measurements can then trigger the automatic generation of nutritionally optimized food.

According to a mission statement for Dr. Logan’s study:

“Our scientists and engineers at CSIRO are working towards this future where food, nutraceuticals and other products will be personalized based on an individual’s genetic makeup, and a reality where optimum well-being for each person is a reality. We are building the underpinning science required to: Develop a personalized and instant food processor, providing the smart, structured soft materials (food and cosmetics) on demand and personalized for you on the day, incorporating sensor technologies that measure food – body and cosmetic – body interactions coupled with personalized genomics and phenotype (lifestyle) data.”

Dr. Logan’s study has participation from CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food and Manufacturing divisions, and it will go beyond focusing solely on conceptual advancements. The idea is to move toward instant ways to precisely detect what an individual’s body needs and instant ways to fabricate customized food to meet those needs.

Logan’s research team will focus on instantly available diagnostics and how 3D printing or similar technologies can fabricate genetically targeted food to correct deficiencies. The diagnostics may leverage, of all things, human sweat. At the Inside 3D Printing Conference, Logan said: “The vision we have is that in 20 years time, someone would wake up in the morning [and] their physiological markers will have already been measured in a really unintrusive way, potentially through their sweat while they’ve been sleeping using biosensor technology.”

CSIRO’s “The DNA Diet” site explores these ideas further. The goal is not just to optimize nutrition for performance-oriented reasons, but to essentially hack the body to defy disease. “DNA damage is the most fundamental cause of developmental and degenerative disease and accelerated aging,” The DNA Diet report notes. “Pioneering CSIRO research has demonstrated that damage to the bodies DNA is a fundamental disease that can be diagnosed and partially reversed. A team of CSIRO scientists identified nine micronutrients that are significantly associated with DNA damage. The group also showed that supplementation with certain micronutrients can reduce DNA damage.”

Through work headed up by Dr. Michael Fenech, CSIRO has already developed a technique for measuring DNA damage that can serve as a model for Dr. Logan’s team to take further. According to The DNA Diet: “Reach 100 [is] a medical clinic offering diagnostic blood tests that measure DNA damage and information relating to the nutritional, life-style and environmental factors that influence it. The team at Reach100 checks the levels of important micronutrients in the patient’s blood, including red cell folate, serum folate and Vitamin B12, which are all essential for the body’s ability to replicate healthy DNA. Reach100 doctors then make recommendations about the health of the patient’s DNA, based on the results of these tests.”

Is it wildly exotic to think that in the future 3D printers might fabricate our food? Actually, many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef. The object of Dr. Logan’s research, though, is to improve health outcomes through the instant fabrication of genetically targeted food.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is less than three months away. Get your ticket today before early bird ticket pricing before it expires to make sure you are the the one and only event focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Innit Acquires ShopWell In Effort To Create A ‘Food GPS’

Today Innit announced they have acquired ShopWell, a personal nutrition app company based in San Carlos, California. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ShopWell, launched in 2010, was one of the first startups to explore personalized nutrition, an area which is starting to gain momentum in Silicon Valley in an increasingly crowded health and wellness app marketplace. The app, which has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, scans packaged foods at retail and provides a score based on the user’s profile. The app’s patented algorithm helps to analyze packaged food and give real-time matching scores against a user’s personalized nutritional profile which factors in a user’s gender, age, allergies and dietary goals.

The deal extends Innit, which has developed a platform for appliance makers to create connected products for the kitchen, further into the nutritional and shopping portions of the food experience. ShopWell’s database of over 400 thousand packaged food items and consumer facing app allows Innit to touch the consumer’s food experience from the point of purchase to consumption.

Kevin Brown, CEO of Innit, told the Spoon he feels the deal allows the combined company to provide something unique in the market.

“This puts us in a unique spot,” said Brown. “We now have what is the market’s leading personalized food platform and now can pair it with the work Innit has done to make it actionable in the kitchen.”

According to Brown, Innit has done extensive work on creating a raw food database as part of an effort to create recipe-driven instructions sets that enable appliances to recognize and perform cooking functions automatically. By combining this with ShopWell’s large database of packaged foods, Innit now has a new way to differentiate itself.

They will need it in an increasingly heated battle to become the kitchen and food “operating system”. Over the past year, other companies such as Drop and SideChef have joined Innit in chasing appliance makers to provide software to help make their devices more intelligent. Innit’s early push to create a kitchen OS led them to land Whirlpool’s Jenn-Air division last year, and over the past few months Drop has announced deals with Bosch and GE Appliances.

The deal also puts Innit in the middle of what some are calling the “Internet of Food”, a nascent effort to create a data ontology of the food universe. Unlike connected devices with radios, processors and operating systems built in, the food world is much more difficult to map. There are private university driven efforts such as those by IC-3, open source industry projects such as the Sage Project and Food Wiki, and government efforts such as the USDA food products database, which are joined by companies such as Shopwell/Innit and Edamam in expanding and standardizing the food data layer.

Innit’s Brown sees the combined company as providing this map as well as instructions on how to get from one place to other in the kitchen.

“Think of it as Waze,” said Brown. “We’re creating a GPS for food.”

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CES 2017 Audio Interview: Habit’s Neil Grimmer

I caught up with Neil Grimmer, CEO of Habit, to talk about his new startup that aims to take personal health and nutrition profiles and create customized meal kits.

Ashley profiled Habit back in October when Campbell’s invested in them as part of their new $125 million fund, Acre Venture Partners. From the post:

“Habit is a newly launched company that will deliver a “complete personalized nutrition solution” based on factors like someone’s biological makeup and metabolism. The CEO of Habit, Neil Grimmer, is also the founder of Plum Organics, a company that he sold to Campbell’s back in 2013. Despite having the VC fund, Campbell’s invested directly in Habit and is the startup’s sole funder, according to a Habit spokesperson.

The company will deliver a testing kit to users and together with the app, users are instructed to gather DNA samples to ship to their certified testing lab. The data collected is combined with the user’s reported lifestyle and personal goals and thrown into their priority algorithm known as the Nutrition Intelligence Engine. The algorithm spits out recommendations for what to eat from registered dieticians and a wellness guide along with fitness goals.”

You can listen to the conversation above and read more about Habit at their website.