ANAHEIM, CALIF. — The personalized nutrition company Habit is on the cusp of taking its first step toward going national. Within nine months company founder and chief executive officer Neil Grimmer said the company will begin offering its testing platform. Building out Habit’s meal preparation and delivery platform will take longer.
 |
| Neil Grimmer, founder and c.e.o. of Habit |
“You can break the company into two parts,” Mr. Grimmer said March 9 during a session at the Natural Products Expo West taking place in Anaheim, Calif. “Our testing platform will be scaling in nine months. Fresh food will take longer. We have a heat map of where people are interested in Habit, and that will dictate where we put our next commissary.”
Habit launched in January and is currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company’s business model features several components. The testing platform requires customers to follow a regimen that includes blood collection after a 10-hour fast in order to develop a baseline. Then users consume a milkshake designed to prompt a metabolic response, Mr. Grimmer said. Following the consumption of the shake users are prompted to collect blood samples at specific time intervals to track how their body responds.
Consumers then send the tests to a laboratory that develops results based on 25 biomarkers. Once the results are complete, they are fed into a digital dashboard the consumer may use to review.
“This is one area where we get a lot of questions,” Mr. Grimmer said. “For many people the results are only the beginning. Once they have them it becomes a question of what to do about it?”
Habit personnel will develop a personalized nutrition plan based on the test results. Users may also order customized meals to be delivered. The company currently offers breakfast, lunch and dinner meal solutions and will also start offering snacks in the near future.
Mr. Grimmer said the cost of entry into the program is around $300 for the testing kit. Meal costs may range from between $50 to $300 per week depending on how many meals users order.
“Our meal prices are at a parity to the leading meal delivery companies out there,” Mr. Grimmer said. “We think of meal delivery as convenient food. We think of ourselves as convenient wellbeing.”
He added that the Habit process is not static over time. Changes people undergo as they age will require additional testing. Such decisions as users deciding to run a marathon or take on another life challenge may also prompt additional testing.
“One of the things we’ve found is people have commonality in biology,” Mr. Grimmer said.
Mr. Grimmer described the commonalities as “seven Habit types,” that include such titles as “range seekers,” “fat seekers,” “balance seekers,” “protein seekers,” and others.
“When we think about the segmentation, the condition of how we live can push us into different groups,” he said. “We may start out as a range seeker, but move to a protein seeker over time.”
Prior to founding Habit, Mr. Grimmer was the c.e.o. of Plum Organics. That company was acquired by the Campbell Soup Co., Camden, N.J., and after the integration Mr. Grimmer moved on to establish Habit. The company garnered significant attention when it was announced Campbell Soup had acquired a stake in the company last year.
