The Food as Health Solution Set

You’ll hear from seven of our portfolio company leaders who are reimagining the role of food in healthcare and thinking about how to make it evidence-based, work within our insurance system, design for real-life adherence, deliver measurable results, and make these solutions accessible to the people who need them most.

So without further ado, let’s meet them.

Paul Roscoe: My name is Paul Roscoe, and I’m the CEO of Mend. Mend has built a really interesting platform that combines clinical nutrition, nutritional supplements, with a digital and human coaching platform, and we engage patients that are going through surgical episodes to help with their perioperative journey, get them ready for surgery, get them recovering from surgery. And inside that delivery is the nutritional supplements that we provide along with our coaching service.

Jeff Bland: I’m Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I’m a PhD in nutritional biochemistry. I’m the CEO founder of Big Bold Health. And our focus is on longevity through immune health. Looking at how individuals can optimize their immune resilience and how that ties together with both health span and longevity.

Catherine Balsam-Schwaber:  I am Catherine Balsam-Schwaber. I am the CEO of Sōlaria Biō. And at Sōlaria Biō we are building what I would consider a breakthrough AI-powered platform for rapid discovery of plant-based microbiome interventions.

Cindy Jordan: My name is Cindy Jordan, and I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Pyx Health. And, as a quick overview of Pyx, we are a tech-enabled care coordination service that helps health plan members overcome non-medical barriers of health and social determinants of health,

Derek Mansfield: I’m Derek Mansfield. I’m the CEO of Mealogic. Mealogic is a white label meal delivery platform that focuses on partnerships with health and wellness and healthcare businesses.

Lauren Driscoll: So I am Lauren Driscoll, and I’m the founder and CEO of NourishedRx. And NourishedRx is a B2B2C platform that bridges food and healthcare to really improve chronic disease and maternal health outcomes. We’re making food as health or food as medicine programs, scalable and measurable for our customers, like health plans, while at the same time, we’re making it straightforward and delicious for our end users.

Lee Chae: My name is Lee Chae. I’m a co-founder and CEO of Brightseed. And a Brightseed, we’re building life science AI to transform health.

Tonya: For decades, healthcare has been focused on treating illness. But many of our companies are working to design systems and solutions that help people stay healthier and enjoy a higher quality of life in the first place. So before we talk about tools or technology, Dr. Jeffrey Bland of Big Bold Health and Derek Mansfield of Mealogic tell us about the role that food plays in redefining what healthcare can be.

Jeff Bland: We’re undergoing a really remarkable transition, I think right now as it relates to what we call healthcare. I think the first thing we recognize is that what we’ve called healthcare really is principally disease care. And that’s good. We’ve got a really sophisticated disease care system.

But it’s really hard when we think about healthcare, how to build that architecture into a disease care system because it really is a different set of objectives. It’s a different language, it’s a different set of variables that you look at when you’re talking about health versus when you’re talking about disease.

Even disease risk reduction, which is the kind of thing that people often think about, I wanna reduce my risk of disease. It tethers us still to the disease model. The other side of the coin is to ask the question, ​‘How are you really functioning? Do you feel well? Are you doing the things you wanna do?

Are you having high-level capabilities of performing in life at the levels that you would like to?’ That’s a different set of questions that really relates to your structural function, your metabolic function, your behavioral function, and your cognitive function. And those are not things that average medicine is taking into account when you have your annual physical exam.

So I think we’re starting to see people ask the question. ​‘Hold on. Is this all about disease, or is it about my ability to perform at high levels and be resilient and enjoy life, for a century of good living?’ And when we do that, then we’re asking really a different set of questions.

It requires a different model. And I think it’s now time where people have started to say we’re at an existential period in which we recognize the food that we’ve been eating, ultra-processed foods, are really contributing to a pandemic of chronic disease. And if we don’t shift the whole kind of way that we view the important role that food plays in shaping our health, and we’re always on the disease side of the equation, the only way we’re getting out on the health side of the equation is to start looking at how food and its nutrients impact the processes and give rise to high level wellness.

That’s a whole new model. But it’s really, I think, in healthcare that we’re really starting to talk about what is health at a level that’s different than what is the absence of disease.

Derek Mansfield: There’s business trends to not only support the information that’s available, but also, frankly, to support the desire of consumers to have more control over their own health outcomes.

So you’re seeing a lot of investment in spaces like concierge medicine, telehealth medicine, and just generally people looking at holistic responses to health issues and trying to drive positive health outcomes through a full holistic view of health. And obviously diet and meals play a huge part in that as well as exercise, rest, et cetera.

So it’s less about looking at the, call it, historical health metrics from a traditional healthcare provider and making adjustments on your own, to actually working with people in businesses that are trying to drive overall long-term health outcomes and diet plays a big part in that.

Tonya: Once you shift from treating disease to cultivating health, food becomes a core part of that equation. But food does not have the same mode of action as a drug. Dr. Jeffrey Bland of Big Bold Health and Catherine Balsam-Schwaber of Sōlaria Biō walk us through  why we need new frameworks and pathways to understand, evaluate, and truly integrate food into medicine.

Jeff Bland: What’s the difference between food as medicine and pharmacological medicine? And I think there’s a very interesting philosophical difference between the two. If you think of the way pharmaceutical medicine has grown up. It has grown up around a specific disease entity. It goes back to the age of antibiotics and bacterial infections with pneumonia. And we found certain molecules called antibiotics that would be able to treat that bug that creates that disease. So it was a fairly linear model: one disease, one agent that causes it, one drug to treat it.

And I think for the early days of pharmaceutical medicine, that model worked very well. The problem is now we’ve got these complex chronic illnesses that are not caused by one indication. There’s multiple things that a person has that weave themselves together that give rise to these chronic conditions.

In that case, we move from maybe the model where one agent against one disease produces an outcome to looking at what food does, and food is multiple bioactives. It’s network pharmacology. It’s not the traditional pharmacology. It works on the same aspects of the body’s physiology as traditional drug pharmacology, but it works on a complex orchestration method.

So when we’ve been doing our work on Tartary buckwheat and we find there are 125 different immune active bioflavonoids. We know that nature does that for a reason. It doesn’t have that to just do it for fun. It does it because the plant needs those array of nutrients in order to produce a positive effect on the health of the plant when consumed by humans, then we get the benefit from that, what’s called network pharmacology in our body.

So it’s using the same kind of tools of our physiology, but in a very different way when we talk about food as medicine as a network pharmacology type of approach.

Catherine Balsam-Schwaber: I think about this as a change in our mental model in a way, right? There’s a lot of hype around supplements, and there are some very good supplements out there, but we are talking about food biology as a precision tool backed by clinical rigor. That is what we are building at Sōlaria Biō, our strains are sourced from edible plants, which is unique, right? Many probiotic strains are sourced from feces, actually. So we are going directly to the source, which is the plants themselves, and patients and clinicians tend to be more comfortable with the idea of using those kinds of plant-based products for long-term daily use, which goes back to why we wanted to be a medical food.

So when we’re thinking about prevention or reduction of harm, which is where we are going with Bondia and decreasing the amount of bone loss, these are very good options for thinking about long-term usage because not only are we enhancing the saving of your bone, we’re also reducing leaky gut, enhancing your entire digestive system with the probiotic.

So the tool that we are delivering through Bondia gives you ancillary benefits that are not only designed specifically for the target, but actually help with your whole system, making you feel overall better in the way that your gut is working.

Tonya: But even though food works differently than medicine, if it’s going to be taken seriously inside the healthcare system, it still has to meet healthcare on its own terms. That means evidence, standards, and accountability. Catherine Balsam-Schwaber of Sōlaria Biō and Paul Roscoe of Mend talk about how they’re building the proof that nutrition can be just as rigorous and reliable as any pharmaceutical intervention.

Catherine Balsam-Schwaber:  When we were bringing Bondia to market and even thinking in the early stages about how we could deliver an incredibly potent and credible product to people who would benefit from Bondia, we wanted something that would be more accessible than a pharmaceutical, have no side effects, like many supplements, and find a place in between, right?

We sit very clearly in between things that are supplements that may not have clinical data and pharmaceuticals that have an extreme level of clinical data, but in the bone category and many of the categories we will be looking at for delivering product for, there are incredibly harsh and difficult side effects that many people actually don’t take the drugs, so they aren’t able to do anything at all.

So for clinicians to trust a medical food we really needed something that was deeply evidence-backed. And in order to have our product categorized as a medical food, we also needed to have drug-level randomized controlled clinical trials. So the clinical trial that we did to bring bone to market was the same level of a trial that you would do for a pharmaceutical.

It’s just that we are not a pharmaceutical. That’s really the only difference. So we did a year-long randomized clinical trial with almost 300 postmenopausal women, and what we saw was that we could reduce bone loss up to 85% in high-risk groups like women who have Osteopenia or in elevated BMI.

Paul Roscoe: So the question around how do we educate the clinicians and what have been some of the best successes for that, I think is an important one. ​‘Cause it’s a challenge both not only from the clinician but also from the patient perspective. And we look at it through these two lenses, how do we provide the confidence that a surgeon can see the value in dietary supplements and specifically Mend’s approach to that, such that they would recommend it or refer their patients to Mend?

And a large part of that, again, goes back to the clinical trial data for us to be able to show the efficacy of the supplements, specifically our formulations. And so that’s a good style point. The secondary element to this is to give them confidence on how these products are being manufactured. We put a lot of emphasis on third-party testing within our formulations and within our process. And you want to make sure if you’re a surgeon and you’re recommending a patient to take one of Mend’s products, that what’s on the label is what’s actually inside the tub or inside the carton.

So that third-party testing is a really important characteristic of it.

Tonya: Even with the strongest evidence, you can’t change a system unless the economics work. Healthcare runs on incentives, reimbursement, and ROI. So companies in this space have to figure out how their solutions fit into the health insurance system and make financial sense for health plans. Lauren Driscoll of NourishedRx and Paul Roscoe of Mend share how they’re navigating that reality.

Lauren Driscoll: So first, for the payer, success is definitely a financial ROI. Bottom line is health plans need to see that the math works, and you know that food is medicine isn’t just a nice to have, but it’s a driver of hard economic value for them.

And we do this for the payer or health plans by looking at medical cost savings, by looking at improvement in quality, and also enhanced retention. Literally, members are staying with health plans because they enjoy the NourishedRx program. And so that’s a huge contributor to ROI.

Paul Roscoe: So the insurance landscape is an important one, I think. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what we would like to see is that the medical foods and the specific dietary supplements that are relevant to that surgical episode become the standard of care. Already, they are reimbursing other elements of the Mend approach. Mend has built a digital and human coaching service. We can ask a patient to take a dietary supplement or a medical food, and that’s one approach.

The other one that we’ve built is this sort of chassis that engages the patient, educates them, does nutrition therapy, counseling, and shows them the value of these supplements. Those types of services, which are treated as remote patient monitoring or chronic care management services, are reimbursable today by insurance companies because I think they’ve seen enough evidence that these remote approaches to engaging a patient have enough value for it to be reimbursed by the payer.

So those are reimbursable. It’s a large part of our business model today. I think what you’ll see in the not-too-distant future is also the dietary supplements themselves, which today have to be paid either delivered by Mend and we treat that as a cost of goods, or the patient pays for that on a cash pay basis.

I think you will see that in certain cases, and particularly probably around the medical food designation, you’ll see some level of reimbursement.

Tonya: No solution can guarantee results if people can’t actually stick with it. Food can only act like medicine if it fits into the patient’s routines and they’re able to follow through. Lauren Driscoll of NourishedRx, Cindy Jordan of Pyx Health, and Derek Mansfield of Mealogic talk about how they’re building models that support real adherence and work within the realities of patients’ lives.

Lauren Driscoll: So we’ve learned a lot about behavior change. So first of all, it is absolutely achievable. But let’s be honest, it is incredibly hard. The food landscape in the US is extremely difficult to navigate. You have the just ubiquity of ultra-processed foods, and sometimes people even have deep, nostalgic attachments to them.

And then you layer on that the complexity of a specific clinical diet, for example, like chronic kidney disease, and it really becomes overwhelming. So it is definitely not easy. But despite those headwinds, if you will, we really have cracked the code at NourishRx, and I’ll highlight really three key findings from our work.

First, and this is very exciting, we found that behavior change results really can outlast an intervention period. So, for example, in a diabetes program, our data shows that we don’t just lower A1C during the program, but we actually continue to see a drop well after the intervention is over.

So that members aren’t just dieting temporarily, but they actually have fundamentally reset their habits. Second, we’ve learned that behavior shift really only happens when people feel the difference. So we will hear people say things like, wow, I walked my mailbox for the first time in months. I didn’t really appreciate what a difference diet could make.

And so we realized that when people are feeling better, their mindset will follow. And that we can’t just tell people to be healthy. We need them to really feel the immediate rewards of it, and then they’re motivated to really, truly change that behavior. And then third, we’ve really learned that the approach has to be personalized. One size fits nobody. And we use evidence-based tools like motivational interviewing to meet people exactly where they are with respect to readiness for change. And by really treating the whole person and combining food with clinical coaching, we turn really micro steps into lasting results.

Cindy Jordan: We found that members more so than ever are constantly being contacted by their health plan, their providers, all facets of the healthcare system, and everybody is contacting them for one thing and one thing only. We’re like, I need you to do this. I need you to do that.

I need you to go into your record. I need you to do this for me. I need you to fill out this form. I need you to do this for your benefits, on and on. What food did, and will continue to do, and this was the thesis, and it’s proving out, is that food was actually something that the majority of the folks that we interacted with actually needed, and it shows up at your doorstep.

It’s not greedy. That’s the problem with kind of healthcare engagement, as it is, it’s inherently greedy. We’re only reaching out to people so that they’ll give us what we need. What food did is it gave them something that they need at the doorstep on their table where they’re sitting there debating very real things about whether I spend my money on food or I spend my money on medicine.

So it was disarming and incredibly powerful in building trust with Pyx as a company.

Derek Mansfield: We work in a diet space, and I personally believe that along with sleep and exercise, diet is one of the fundamental things that you need to get right to drive long-term health outcomes. And the way that this information is coming now in the personalization that is occurring, really requires businesses like ours to provide the level of filtering and the level of specificity in those meals, to allow people to make good decisions that are gonna drive those positive health outcomes. We’re not a precision nutrition company. We’re not creating formulas for people based on micron level of nutrients and minerals and things like that they might need because we’re more of a whole food meal delivery company.

But within our system, we are providing lots of information on macronutrients, micronutrients, ingredient structure, for people to make good decisions about their health outcomes. Hopefully, in a more natural environment where it is part of their daily routine to eat normal meals. That’s what we want to be able to do is insert ourselves into some sort of normalcy of life where you’re actually getting the outcomes you want, but eating delicious meals that don’t feel like they’re medically tailored.

They just feel like they’re something that you would be really happy to serve to your family, and frankly, you find delicious and like to eat.

Tonya: Like in most sectors, data and AI are changing the game in food as health, both in what’s possible and in how quickly companies can find solutions and deliver real results. Lee Chae of Brightseed, and Lauren Driscoll of NourishedRx share how they’re using these new technologies to propel the space forward.

Lee Chae: We’re building a collection of AIs to attack different parts of the R&D workflow from discovery to commercialization. With our first AI, Forager, the granddaddy, it is designed to disrupt discovery. So what it does is it opens up new doors in terms of new molecules with new efficacies that companies can build products around impact. The second AI we’re working on, Codename Hummingbird, it’s our product innovation and development AI, and allows people to get all the relevant information to the table really quickly to filter winners and losers early on.

Lauren Driscoll: You can think of us as an operating system for food as medicine, and as such, we are sitting between the payer, the patient, and the food supply. And so we are the beneficiary of an unusually broad data set, and we’re able to really capture that, as the you could say, the essential fuel for AI-driven personalization.

And to unpack that a bit, we use it really in three different ways. First, I’d say we’re capturing data that healthcare claims data doesn’t capture. So, capturing the context. So health plans have diagnosis codes, but we are seeing the human reality. And because transactions are happening on our platform, we’re capturing real-time data on food preferences, logistics, daily well-being.

And so this gives us the ability to really understand who the member actually is, not just what disease they have. And then second, we’re using data really to optimize the personalization. So we’re not relying on manual matching.

We’re actually feeding longitudinal data from the member into our recommendation engine to really predict what is going to engage a specific member at a specific point in time. Is it prepared meals? Is it groceries? And so this allows us to deliver the right intervention at the right moment to really unlock that sort of aha moment that the member has earlier.

And then finally, it enables us to scale efficiently. There are really great food as medicine or food as health programs being delivered on a community-based level, but to be able to do it really at scale, we have to be able to identify where exactly is human support needed the most? And by letting our platform handle many of the complex logistics and routine patterns that otherwise take quite a bit of time, we’re really able to free up our registered dieticians to focus on the members who really need high-touch care, when they really need the high-touch care.

Tonya: At the end of the day, we really hope that these solutions can reach the people who need it most. For millions of Americans, food isn’t a lifestyle choice but a daily calculation around cost, access, and just getting by. Cindy Jordan of Pyx talks about how food’s flexibility is what makes it such a powerful and accessible solution.

Cindy Jordan: So I think that the way food engagement can continue to evolve in an increasingly complex world is that, and this is really a testament to how the great divide is happening between the haves and haves nots, but there are very few people right now that don’t have some kind of food insecurity.

Now, whether that’s, they’re at the point where they can’t put food on the table, or they’re at the point where they can’t put fresh food, nutritious food, nutrients on the table in some way, shape, or form, this touches almost every American household and most particularly the ones that we’re dealing with.

So the way that I see food as a way to like help us in this ever-evolving space between Medicaid and Medicare is that it’s nimble. It can be a produce box. Like right now, we’ve already started shipping what we call our pantry boxes, which are very geared toward Thanksgiving meals, right?

It can be citrus, it can be snack boxes, because you have four foster kids in your home and you have nothing that you can send them to school with that’s not perishable. Food can be nimble and can address it all the way down to the family level, the individual level, in order to help them navigate the system.

Tonya: Listening to these leaders, it’s clear that they’re not just working on independent solutions. They’re creating the blueprint for a new kind of healthcare system, one where food is preventative, personal, accessible, and powerful enough to reshape how we think about health. Check out our show notes for more on each of these companies as well as a link to download our new Food as Health report. 

Thank you for tuning into the S2G podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share it with a friend. For more information or to connect with us, check out s2gin​vest​ments​.com.