It's personal: Techy drink startup stirring up interest in Europe
Marco Iotti and Reza Zanjani, co-founders of Mixfit Nutrition, aim to help consumers track their activity and diet and mix drinks their body requires for that moment of consumption through their connected app and drink mixer.
Iotti has a background in agricultural biotechnology and nutrition and previously worked for Nespresso, says personalised nutrition will be the only version of nutrition in the future.
“Everyone wants to be involved in personalised nutrition. I think, in 10 years time, we won’t even speak about personalised nutrition as all nutrition will be personalised. It’s beautiful what’s happening at the moment as we are in the renaissance of nutrition.”
But Iotti says the Mixfit concept provides digital personalised nutrition in a more holistic way than others on the market.
“So everyone wants personalised nutrition now but the reality of this is people use genetic data or some diet data but there’s several pieces of data you need and the most important thing is the real time data.
“Getting the nutrition and activity in real time are the hardest bits of data to get and the most important as our nutritional needs in that moment vary vastly depending on our activity levels and what we’ve eaten that day.”
The Mixfit app - which connects to the user’s Fitbit to grab their activity data - allows the user to take a photo of their meal and answer questions about quantities and cooking methods in order to provide a very detailed nutritional review of the food consumed.
The user can connect their app to a Mixfit drink mixer and it will mix a drink full of all the nutrients and minerals that person is lacking according to their nutritional intake and activity for that day.
Payment for the service is through a monthly subscription allowing subscribers to connect to any drink mixing device. Users are advised to make two drinks throughout their day to ensure they gain all their daily nutrition requirements.
Ultimately Iotti envisages users will have the ability to access the machines in their homes as well as in gyms, health stores and other public areas.
NutraIngredients reported last summer that global nutrition giant DSM acquired a 50% stake in the startup as part of its aim to enter the B2C market.
Zanjani told NutraIngredients at that time that the partnership looked set to be hugely beneficial to Mixfit and Iotti confirmed last week that both parties have gained masses of expertise from one another.
“From the very beginning, DSM believed in us when it was more difficult to believe in us, they saw the traction we had. We are privileged to have the supply chains they have and we are so grateful for that.”
The business is currently up and running in the US and it will be moving into Europe in the next couple of months.
The company is also working to reduce the unit cost and the size of the machine to one third of its current size to encourage more in-home purchases.
