Bitewell

bitewell is a food health company that operates a marketplace for groceries, restaurant meals, meal kits, recipes and pantry items, organized around personalized health guidance. Its central product is the FoodHealth Score, a 0-10 rating paired with a grey/red/yellow/green color system that is applied to individual food items across the marketplace; the company likens it to a credit score for food, where every purchase is scored and the aggregate of a user's purchases indicates whether their diet is net-accretive or net-dilutive to their health. The company states the health-first lens is applied to more than 85% of the US food supply.

The platform onboards users with a short survey covering allergies, dietary restrictions, food preferences, fitness routines and personal goals, then uses AI-driven personalization to recommend specific deliverable foods, restaurant meals, groceries and recipes nearby, learning from user behavior over time. Restaurant and menu data is vetted in three tiers by algorithms plus dieticians and nutritionists, ranging from publicly available menu data at the lowest tier to formal partnerships in which restaurants share recipe books under non-disclosure agreements at the highest tier. At its 2022 Dallas launch the company reported data on thousands of restaurants and more than 10,000 curated recipes.

bitewell positions itself as the first corporate food health benefits provider and is building what it calls the 'Food as Health Benefits' category, selling to employers that offer the service to employees as part of preventative health programs, with the stated aim of reducing insurance premiums and improving user health.

Founding story

Co-founders Chris Fanucchi and Samantha Citro Alexander started the company in 2020 out of their own food problems: Fanucchi spent weeks at a time traveling, which made eating well difficult, while Citro Alexander had managed food allergies and dietary restrictions her whole life. After testing numerous food and nutrition apps without finding one that answered how to find the right food nearby, they built bitewell as a healthy food marketplace. Fanucchi had previously sold the sparkling water brand Limitless to Keurig Dr Pepper in 2020, and Citro Alexander had been director of North America consumer engagement and integrated marketing at Estee Lauder Companies' Smashbox brand.

Business model

bitewell contracts directly with employers, which subscribe to the platform and offer it to employees as a food health benefit within preventative health programs; employees then shop the marketplace for groceries, restaurant meals and meal kits using the FoodHealth Score. Earlier reporting described a marketplace approach layering nutrition and diet information over third-party food delivery and grocery services, with subscriber-based consumer access during the Dallas pilot and launch.

Employer subscriptions to the food health benefit are the stated commercial channel; earlier coverage described bulk-purchasing-based pricing on the marketplace set roughly 10% below brands' direct-to-consumer prices.

Traction

About 5,000 subscribers were reported during the months-long Dallas pilot that preceded the July 2022 public launch. At launch the company had data on thousands of restaurants and more than 10,000 curated recipes, a headcount of roughly 20 with plans to double by the end of 2022, and signed tier-three restaurant partners in Dallas. The $4M seed round announced in June 2023 was described as oversubscribed.

Latest developments

In June 2023 bitewell announced the close of an oversubscribed $4M seed round co-led by the Lake Nona Sports & Health Tech Fund and Refinery Ventures, with participation from Trybe Ventures (Alex Morgan and Servando Carrasco), Mudita Venture Partners, Harvest Ridge Capital and Bertelsmann's BDMI. Proceeds were earmarked for executive hires, national sales expansion, academic research partnerships and technology and data infrastructure.