As reported on TechCrunch.
by STEVE O’HEAR
Arguably, eating healthily takes both motivation and time. And in what’s being billed as “a world first, three-dimensional wellness experience” (presumably with a straight face), the recipe kit subscription service HelloFresh is partnering with weight loss coaching app Noom to tackle the problem from both ends.
Available first in the U.S. but eventually rolling out in other parts of the world, users of Noom will be able to subscribe to weight loss meal plans designed and delivered by HelloFresh, consisting of the recipe, step-by-step instructions and all the required fresh ingredients, promising a healthy meal that can be cooked in under 30 minutes.
Priced at $69 plus tax per-week for three two-portion meals, the HelloFresh offering shows up in the Noom app (available for Android), although the customer relationship — subscriptions and payments — are solely managed by Noom, with HelloFresh powering the offline elements of recipe design, ingredient sourcing and product delivery. To the end-user, it’s almost entirely branded as a Noom feature, with the only giveaway being a “powered by the award-winning HelloFresh team” tagline. As we’d expect, the partnership does, however, include a revenue share element with HelloFresh.
To that end, Noom currently claims 6.7 million users of its app worldwide — it isn’t breaking out numbers for the U.S. specifically, where the HelloFresh partnership will initially debut — so there’s quite a lot of potential for up-selling the new HelloFresh-powered recipe kit subscription. The integration goes a little deeper, too. Along with what is essentially a white label version of HelloFresh inside of the Noom app, each recipe kit delivered comes with a unique QR code that can be scanned so that key nutritional information is logged and updated in a user’s personal Noom weight loss plan. Thus, the three-dimensionalness is complete.
New York-based Noom is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm Ventures, Harbor Pacific Capital, and M8 Capital. It claims to be the leading weight loss app on Android, providing features such as the ability to track daily food intake via simple food categories — green, yellow, red — therefore omitting the need to count calories. In addition, users can track their motion with the app’s built-in pedometer and are given daily tasks to get them taking in some exercise. So it’s part quantified-self and part good old-fashioned nagging.
HelloFresh, headquartered in Berlin, Germany and incubated out of the Samwer brothers’ startup factory Rocket Internet, competes with the likes of Blue Apron and Fresh Dish in the U.S., and is also available in Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, and Australia. It recently raised a new $10 million funding round from Vorwerk Ventures, along with original backers Rocket Internet, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Kinnevik.