Anthony Ortiz thinks the supermarket shopping experience contributes to obesity because it encourages people to shop for products instead of meals. By making it more convenient, fun and healthy, he believes his delivery service bringing healthy meal ingredients to parents and busy folks on the go could have a big impact on how people think about food.
Ortiz is the CEO and co-founder of Fitly, which took part in DreamIt Health’s demo day last week. He’s calculated that the soaring childhood obesity rates combined with the hectic life of working parents means there’s a big market opportunity for the service his business can offer.
The website offers images of meals users can select and then see the ingredients and nutritional information. Recipes listed on its website follow USDA guidelines. Meals are 50 percent plant-based and are designed to balance whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
Users can choose as few as three meals and up to five dinners per week. It plans to add lunch, snack and dessert options as the business grows. It recently started a five month pilot program with Penn Medicine employees.
Instead of wasting time trying to make home deliveries, delivery trucks meet customers where it’s convenient. It will send to locations at or near offices when people are leaving work or when they are picking up children from school or leaving fitness centers. It also wants to work with corporate wellness plans.
Ortiz co-founded his Philadelphia based business with Heidi Chapnick, the acting COO who directed ecommerce development at online grocery business Peapod. She helped build the business and worked on external vendor partnerships, logistics, marketing, customer service and new business services. She has also worked for CVS and A&P, among other businesses.
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Although Ortiz acknowledges other companies are trying to tap this market, he sees some problems with their strategy. Some deliver precise measurements of the ingredients that a recipe would call for. “The more touchpoints you have, the greater the chance of things going wrong.”
The company is currently raising $1 million from investors. The company has a $25,000 campaign on indiegogo also. It’s also continuing add stores and strategic partners as it goes.
Although it sounds like the sort of thing that caters to comfortably off consumers, Ortiz says it charges $6 per meal so his customer base includes annual incomes spanning $35,000 to $100,000.
Ortiz said it doesn’t charge customers for delivery or mark up items. Instead, it generates revenue by taking a commission from grocery stores. The way Ortiz sees it, Fitly is providing a customer base these stores wouldn’t otherwise have since it delivers products to neighborhoods well outside the stores’ catchment areas.
Although he started the business one and a half years ago, Ortiz credited the DreamIt Health accelerator with helping advance the company’s development. “We’ve accomplished more in four months than we could have on our own.”
