Founded in 2016, MixFit offers customers an app named MINA alongside a drink making machine. The two work together to track the customer’s activity, diet, blood levels, and more, to make drinks filled with the correct dose of nutrients that the app predicts their body requires in that moment.
After delivering the service to homes, gyms, health centers and offices across the globe, the company is now concentrating its expansion efforts on the intelligence side of its business and is offering software which it believes can compete with MyFitnessPal.
Marco Iotti, CTO, CSO and co-founder of MixFit, explains that it’s the intelligence and algorithms behind the MINA app that are really valuable to other nutrition brands and health service providers.
“I have said for several years that personalised nutrition is the future of nutrition, the only issue is that the nutrition industry is still driven by the fact that everyone has something to sell and they need to sell in mass quantity.
“With us being primarily a tech company we don’t have the stress of needing to sell a specific product, meaning we can focus our energy on listening to the consumer and learning what they need.
“There’s a huge interest in the intelligence behind our company because we can pull together so many different factors including diet, lifestyle, wearables data, blood tests, DNA samples, and environmental conditions. That makes our service unique.”
The firm is opening up conversations with other companies and organisations who can make use of the app with coaches and nutritionists being some of the obvious examples of those who need to keep track of what their clients are eating and what they are doing every day. They are already working with a company which provides nutrition advice for cancer patients as well as some brands that want to add value to the nutrition product they provide.
Iotti explains: “The opportunities for collaboration are endless. The MixFit drinks machine is just an example of what you can do with the MINA intelligence and algorithms. Another outcome could be a meal recipe, another could be a personalised dose of pills or powdered supplement.”
The entrepreneur believes the service even beats a leading app in this field.
“People have told us they were trying to use MyFitnessPal but they weren’t happy with the usability and it didn’t do everything they want. We said ‘you tell us what matters to you and we’ll integrate that into the app', rather than trying to guess what they need and then selling to them.”
In 2018, global nutrition giant DSM acquired a 50% stake in Mixfit and since then it has expanded its reach from the US, across the globe.
Iotti says the pandemic has accelerated interest in personalised nutrition as people have become more aware than ever about the individuality of their health needs.
“With something like COVID, we knew there was no ‘silver bullet’ in terms of diet or supplements and people began questioning their lifestyle choices and whether they were best for their personal health. Making this the ideal time for us to initiate new partnerships.”