According to the recent Nutraingredients-USA award winner, Baze is the first blood-based, at-home nutritional testing kit that offers subscription supplements and personalized food recommendations. The now-patented process analyzes customer’s blood nutrient levels obtained from an at-home testing device, anthropometric and lifestyle data, and health goal and uses the results to make precise including personalized supplements and nutrient-dense food recommendations.
Baze said this newly patented process is especially innovative because it has the ability to continuously reassess biological and lifestyle inputs that can be put back into the recommendation engine. This ever-evolving feedback loop becomes more intelligent and precise as more data is leveraged.
Given the sensitive nature of the data collected, the company said it is currently preparing for an ISO 27001 certification for their efforts to ensure data privacy, integrity and availability to the highest standards of its Information Security Management System.
Four years in the making
“We applied for this patent four years ago, when the personalized nutrition industry was still in its infancy. We’re thrilled by this patent approval and feel it further validates the industry-first innovative approach that we’ve brought to life over the years,” said Philipp Schulte, CEO and co-founder of Baze. “We knew there was a better way to make personalized nutrient recommendations; we leveraged our team’s mathematical, pharmaceutical, and medical backgrounds to sketch out our now-patented approach to true precision nutrition."
The company said it is continuously expanding its set of reported micronutrient biomarkers, and are also looking to leverage other digital markers and DNA. To target nutrient needs, Baze recommends a precise supplement regimen, provided in monthly packs for habit building, and they have recently expanded their platform to incorporate holistic food and meal recommendations.
The secret to success
Despite growing interest in personalized nutrition, it can be a challenging field to navigate.
In its latest report, ‘Finding Business Success in Personalized Nutrition,’ Lux Research outlined framework for constructing a winning strategy. The report details why multiple high-profile companies have failed, such as Habit, uBiome and Arivale — all of which ceased operations entirely.
“One of the biggest barriers to success with personalized nutrition has been in pricing and aligning product value to what users need. When this is coupled with lack of business experience and valued partnerships, it’s impossible to sustain an effective business model,” said Thomas Hayes, lead report author and analyst at Lux.
“We believe that success in personalized nutrition rests ultimately on providing a quality offering. To us this means creating real health, fitness, and wellbeing impact for our users,” said Schulte. “This is why we are so content to show that on average our users resolve three out of four nutrient deficiencies in the first three months with Baze.”
Schulte went on, “We’re focused on improving micronutrient status as the foundation to our offerings. Firstly because we strongly believe that micronutrient status is what we should really focus on to make a difference for our users and secondly, by specializing in one critical area of overall health, we can put our full focus to doing this right. As we’ve seen with other companies in this challenging space, spreading ourselves too thin would otherwise diminish the impact we can provide in an area that we’re uniquely positioned to excel.”
Schulte explained that achieving this kind of impact rests on two pillars: Evidence-based offerings and combining this hard science approach with a world class user experience.
“This means for example, to actually empower customers to take action — recommendations alone are not enough,” Schulte noted, adding “The solutions we provide have to be as easy as possible to incorporate into the customer’s existing lifestyle, such as with home-delivered supplements, and an easy way to integrate more nutrient-dense food options via our partners to fill nutrient gaps. It means as well to be very price sensitive, where we have innovated to reduce blood analysis costs by 10x. It ultimately means to have a product that is fun, simple, and engaging to drive real sustainable impact and retention.”