MyFoodPlanit
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The shortest elevator in the world: “We’re an all-in-one food tool that lets you organize recipes, make meal plans and shopping lists, and track your intake with a helpful AI assistant.”
Business: MyFoodPlanit
Location: Seattle, Washington
Year of foundation: 2023
Website/App: https://myfoodplanit.com/
Funding round to date: “At this point, it’s self-funded. I have two business partners who have invested some money, but most of it is self-funded. We haven’t done any type of financing round or anything like that.
Who are your investors? “We’ve invested about $130,000 so far.”
Looking for more investment? “Yes definitely.”
Tell us about yourself, founder Ryan Chapman: “I was overweight and had a poor diet growing up, and throughout college I was overweight. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and have studied mechanical engineering for about 10 years. In 2003-2004, I lost 100 pounds. I got into triathlons and started doing well in them and got in shape for the first time. I began to discover a passion for coaching other people. I did that at school, I used to tutor maths and things like that and I’ve always been a tutoring/coaching help person, I like doing that sort things. I started helping people with triathlons, helping them with nutrition and diet. That turned into creating a brand called 90/10 Nutrition, with which we have a food blog and a way to eat healthy. I’ve been running this since 2015. I left my engineering job in 2012 and started doing all this stuff. Through this, we became MyFoodPlanit from what we learned in 90/10 Nutrition.
Who are your co-founders/partners? “One of the partners is Heidi Boortz. She is also my partner in 90/10 Nutrition and that happened because she started working in 90/10 Nutrition, which was my idea in 2012-13, and she did very well with it . She started planning meals for people following my 90/10 nutrition program and I ended up hiring her and working with her to plan meals for that brand. Since then, she has been my business partner.
How does your platform work? “It’s a subscription platform and it allows you to organize all your recipes. You can import recipes or enter recipes, so if you have them on paper, you can put them there. You can label them, organize them however you want. You have all your recipes in one place. This is the first part of the platform. From there, you can drag and drop all those recipes onto a meal planning calendar, move them around, and make a real meal plan yourself. You can then select a date range in the shopping list generator and it will pull in all the ingredients for everything in that date range on your meal plan and create a shopping list in just a few clicks for you. We have an Instacart integration that allows you to take that shopping list, upload it directly to Instacart and purchase it or you can print it, email it or go to the store. The last part is tracking. Go through the entire planning process and then track your progress. You can take all the elements of your meal plan or everything you eat and put them in a food journal and get all your measurements, like macros and all that good stuff. For sports, many people track their macros specifically to try to achieve a particular goal, whether it’s weight gain or loss, or body composition. This will help you keep track of all these things. The difference being that many other things can help you track your food and incorporate it. This starts from the planning stage so you can plan your food and then track it, not just put it in after you’ve basically eaten it. You can plan what you are going to consume, then put it in, and it appears directly in the food diary where you see all the measurements of your stuff.
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What problem does your business solve? “Simplify the process of organizing, planning and tracking your diet. It’s an app for everything. Many apps work well with food planning, so you can organize your recipes, make a meal plan, and make a shopping list. But tracking your macros and the nutrition side is not there. There are some great apps that track nutrition and aren’t very good at scheduling. That’s one thing, instead of having to use several different apps to do what you want to do.
How much does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We have two levels. One is with the AI assistant and the other is without the AI assistant. It’s $9.95 per month without, and $12.49 per month with. We also have annual options that are discounted if you want to pay for a year at a time, like you see on a lot of other things. A lot of people could benefit from this, but based on history, many families, those with children, try to plan their meals and take their children everywhere. Busy professionals would be another target audience. People who are very busy but tend to eat out a lot but would like to get into meal planning and need a simplification of that.
How do you market your product? “Mainly through influencers, food bloggers and things like that. We try to work with fitness and food influencers.
How are you growing and what is your targeted level of growth? “We have no problem with scale. We can support an entire group of customers at once because of the way we’ve set this up. I’m aiming for around 10,000 users in the first year of our business.
Who are your competitors and what sets you apart? “There are probably two or three big meal planners that are pretty direct competitors to us. The problem with all of them is that they don’t follow up. You can make a meal plan, print out a shopping list, and head to the store, but once you’ve consumed the food, there’s no follow-up: “What did I eat?” And if you eat something that’s not on your meal plan, like a Snickers bar, it’s not on this tool. They’re great for dragging and dropping recipes and creating a meal plan and shopping list, but they don’t have that tracking element or the AI element. I haven’t seen anyone else doing AI stuff in this space yet. MyFitnessPal is probably one of our biggest competitors and they take care of the tracking. I know tons of people who use MyFitnessPal to capture their daily activities. They have a huge database of users who enter food so you can find just about anything you eat there. They don’t have the planning side. You have to piece it together. You can use one to plan your meals, get your meal plan, and use the other to see how you consumed your calories and macros.
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What is the unfair advantage that separates your company? “It takes the whole process, from planning to follow-up. Nobody has done it yet. I’ve seen a lot of things in the AI space that are like, “Woo hoo, there’s AI, let’s make it do things.” For this particular space, many people simply ask the AI to create recipes. These are untested recipes. It’s like this AI is taking these things out of its knowledge base and creating this recipe that no one has ever tried before. You don’t know if it’s going to work. We have a way to use AI to find and help you curate real recipes that have been tested and sourced from the internet, rather than just dreaming up recipes from scratch like a lot of this AI stuff that we see.
What milestone have you recently reached or will you reach soon? “We just launched on October 4. This is our first big step.”
What values are at the heart of your brand? “This comes from the fact that we have been practicing 90/10 nutrition for the last eight years. This stems from this, making healthy eating easier to understand and more accessible to people. Meal planning was a recurring theme over the past eight years of working with people. Meal planning and tracking was something people wanted but didn’t know how to do well and didn’t have the right apps for it. Making healthy eating easier and more accessible to people is our goal.
What does success for your business ultimately look like? “We would like to make a decent living helping people eat healthy. We’re not working to become the next MyFitnessPal or anything like that, but we would love to have a group of people who love the app and use it to help themselves eat healthier or eat the way they like eat, in a simple way. and live well from it. »
What should investors or clients know about you – the person, your life experiences – to show they can believe in you? “Having the life experience that I have had in the fitness and nutrition world is helpful for people to know. Losing 100 pounds, getting into triathlons, I’ve done a few Full Ironmans and helped other people do them. I left a good career to help other people learn how to do this stuff. I have a real passion for healthy eating, meal planning, fitness and general nutrition.
How much crossover is there between the meal planning industry and the sports world? “For people who are trying to perform well in sports, anyone who is successful at this sort of thing will tell you that nutrition is key. I was just talking about Ironmans, half-Ironmans and marathons, and nutrition is a much higher percentage of success than most people think. Not just for racing nutrition, but also for your training nutrition. This helps with body composition and performance. There are a lot of people who do this stuff who would benefit from something that could help track all this stuff.
