As a busy undergraduate student at MIT, Christina Bognet decided she wanted to start eating a healthier diet. She started checking the nutritional content of her foods and thinking about portion sizes. She created grocery lists to minimize food waste and costs, sifting through hundreds of recipes to find ones that were both healthy and delicious. Then she had to figure out how to prepare the meals she had selected.
Bognet was successful, losing nearly 50 pounds during his junior and senior years. But she realized that other people, including those with families, demanding jobs or specific health conditions, wouldn’t have the time to research healthier food choices and spend hours every week of shopping and cooking.
This idea led Bognet to found PlateJoy, a meal planning platform that tailors food recommendations for each user to help them adopt a healthy diet based on their unique lifestyle and health goals.
When a user subscribes to PlateJoy, they take a quiz with more than 50 questions on things like dietary preferences, medical conditions, family size, time constraints, and more. PlateJoy’s algorithm uses the results to choose from thousands of recipes in its database and design a personalized meal plan complete with a list of ingredients for grocery shopping. Users in more than 4,000 cities nationwide can also get their groceries delivered the same day through Instacart.
Earlier this year, PlateJoy began offering a program that has been shown to be more effective than medications in preventing type 2 diabetes. Several insurance companies and large employers have recently begun reimbursing users of the program, which guides participants through a series of educational videos and includes a year of personalized meal planning, a free scale and a Fitbit.
With this development, PlateJoy is less of a conventional meal delivery service and more of a digital health company focused on changing lives through food.
“We are building a new category to bridge the gap between medicine and the modern consumer,” Bognet says. “PlateJoy’s approach is not to create a sterile, prescriptive healthcare company. It’s about using cutting-edge research and combining it with a mainstream brand that people are really excited about.
A change of direction
Bognet came to MIT from a small rural town in Pennsylvania. She majored in neuroscience and initially planned to become a doctor. But by her senior year, she realized that some health problems could be prevented or reversed by using the same lifestyle interventions she had used herself. She knew that as a doctor, she could only pay attention to one patient at a time, but that by using technology, she could create a solution to help millions of people every day.
“I thought that if I really wanted to help people live happier, healthier lives, I should do something that could scale to as many people as possible,” Bognet says.
In 2012, Bognet had already taken her pre-med MCAT exams but decided to start PlateJoy instead of going to medical school. In the years since, she teamed up with co-founder Dan Nelson, a software developer who currently serves as CTO of PlateJoy, to create a digital tool that could help people adopt — and stay — a healthy diet.
Bognet says her demanding classes at MIT gave her confidence that she could overcome challenges that at first seemed insurmountable. She also believes her experience at MIT led her to help others.
“MIT is focused on using technology to help large numbers of people,” Bognet says. “Without an MIT background, I don’t know if I would have been as inspired to think about what I was doing on a large scale.”
Start a business
Before PlateJoy could begin helping vulnerable populations such as those with pre-diabetes, Bognet had to create a sustainable business by offering a solution that could provide value to anyone looking to improve their diet. She interviewed hundreds of people and realized that whatever she built, it should be personalized and fit seamlessly into users’ lives. Feature by feature, the PlateJoy platform was designed around these two ideas.
PlateJoy sends recipes directly to users’ phones, tracking what they already have in their pantry to reduce waste and simplify trips to the supermarket. The platform also offers educational videos on topics such as sleep, nutrition and fitness. Users can change their food preferences at any time and add their own recipes to consolidate their shopping lists. Additionally, the Instacart partnership allows users to opt for same-day delivery if they don’t want to do their shopping themselves.
Today, Bognet says the service has attracted thousands of subscribers in all 50 states and 30 countries around the world. She believes the key to PlateJoy’s success is its ability to create healthy meal plans that users are likely to stick to.
“Most diets fail because people focus on dieting rather than lifestyle changes,” says Bognet. “By understanding a person, what is available to them, what they can afford, and what they like, we give them something they can stick with in perpetuity.”
Creating a sustainable diet isn’t just necessary for building a business: it’s also key to achieving health goals and treating disease. In fact, a 2002 study by the National Institute of Health found that the lifestyle intervention was almost twice as effective in preventing diabetes as metformin, a drug commonly prescribed to people with pre-diabetes.
This data has led health insurance companies and employers to recognize the importance of funding prevention. In the United States, more than 20 million people with prediabetes currently have free access to PlateJoy through their insurer.
“From day one, my goal was to build something that was so good that health insurance companies would pay for it the same way they pay for drugs,” she says. “It took a few years to get the product to a point where we can get that reimbursement, which is empowering to patients.”
For Bognet, the goal is not to transition PlateJoy from a consumer brand company to a healthcare company, but rather to merge the two in a way that helps as many people as possible.
“We want the PlateJoy experience to be fun, luxurious and of course educational for people, which is different because many health products that exist today are anything but that,” Bognet says. “So we want to make sure that we take the consumer seriously. We want to be a trusted source of information while helping people feel positively connected to the product. When it comes to building great consumer brands, there’s no reason why health should be left behind. Taking care of yourself and being healthy should be one of the most enjoyable experiences there is.
