food-as-medicine
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FoodHealth Built the Everything App. It Failed. Now It Wants to Score Every Grocery Aisle.
FoodHealth's first nutrition app tried to do everything and did none of it especially well. Two pivots later, its 1-to-100 score is inside major grocers, industry data products and a new GLP-1 shopping app - a useful lesson in saving the engine while scrapping the vehicle.
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine®
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine® is an Austin, Texas company that produces chef-crafted, dietitian-approved Medically Tailored Meals designed to help manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and renal disease. Founded in 2011 as a healthy consumer food brand sold in more than 10,000 retail stores, the company pivoted to lead the Food Is Medicine movement, delivering ready-to-eat meals that are increasingly paid for by health insurers and delivered directly to members' homes. Led by Chairman and CEO Mark Walker, a CPA and founder of athlete-backed Dugout Ventures, Performance Kitchen operates nationwide production and distribution reaching roughly 98% of the U.S.
GEM
GEM is a Los Angeles-based wellness company that reimagines the daily multivitamin as a whole-food bite rather than a pill or gummy. Founded in 2018 by Sara Cullen, GEM packs 20+ vitamins, minerals, superfoods, prebiotics, probiotics and microalgae into a single real-food chew, sold mainly through a subscription model plus retail and Amazon. Its pitch is 'food is medicine' - transparent, plant-based, and traceable nutrition for people who distrust synthetic supplements.
Methodology
Methodology is a premium, San Francisco-founded meal delivery service that ships chef-prepared, nutritionist-designed meals nationwide. Positioned around the idea of 'food as medicine,' its rotating weekly menus are free of gluten, dairy, refined sugar, canola oil and preservatives, cooked in avocado oil with sustainable proteins and 200+ plant varieties a week. Meals arrive ready to reheat in reusable glass jars and bentos that the company collects and sanitizes - a closed-loop packaging system aimed at zero food waste. Founded by former J.P. Morgan and Lumosity operator Julie Nguyen in 2015, the brand also runs a postpartum nourishment program for new mothers.
Prado
Prado is an Austin-based Food-as-Medicine platform that lets clinicians prescribe medically tailored meals and lets patients pay for them with pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars. It stitches together the parts that usually don't talk to each other - a compliant Letter of Medical Necessity, HIPAA- and IRS-approved checkout, white-label storefronts, and fulfillment - so healthy prepared food becomes both prescribable and reimbursable. Founded in 2020 by former Snap Kitchen CEO Jon Carter, Prado has supported the sale of more than 25 million meals and connects food operators to a network of 70M+ tax-advantaged account holders.
Milo Krastev
Milo Krastev is the co-founder of Foodsmart (formerly Zipongo), the San Francisco company that turned nutrition into a covered health benefit for more than three million Americans. He spent a decade as the company's CFO and Head of Growth before handing off the finance chair in 2025 to run strategy and business development full time. Before Foodsmart he moved through the rooms where big money gets allocated - investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, activist investing at ValueAct Capital, and financial strategy at Palantir - then bet the whole resume on the idea that food, not just pills, belongs on a prescription pad.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Julie Nguyen
Julie Nguyen is the CEO and co-founder of Methodology, a Bay Area premium meal-delivery service that ships chef-cooked, ingredient-strict meals nationwide in reusable glass jars. A Stanford economics grad who jumped from J.P. Morgan to Lumosity to founder life, she bootstrapped the company in 2015 by emptying her 401(k) and has grown it to eight-figure annual revenue.
Sara Cullen
Sara Cullen is the founder and CEO of GEM, a Los Angeles wellness company that reinvented the daily multivitamin as a bite-sized chew made from real, whole-food ingredients. After a personal health slump in her late twenties left her disillusioned with the synthetic-filler vitamin aisle, the Oregon farm kid and Cornell graduate built the product she could not find. She validated it inside a private Facebook group of women before raising venture capital, selling more than 20 million bites, and turning 'food is medicine' into a real business.
Abbot's
Abbot's (formerly Abbot's Butcher) is a Costa Mesa, California maker of premium plant-rich proteins built from 100% real food ingredients - pea protein, vegetables, herbs, spices, extra virgin olive oil and vinegars. Founded in 2017 by Kerry Song, the brand makes plant-based 'Chorizo,' Ground 'Beef,' Chopped and Fajita Chick'n, Italian 'Sausage' and high-protein veggie burgers that are free from the top nine allergens, seed oils, gums, preservatives and artificial flavors. With distribution in thousands of retail and foodservice locations including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Publix and Target, Abbot's positions clean, craveable plant food under a 'food as medicine' philosophy.
Bonafide Provisions
Bonafide Provisions is a Carlsbad, California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth founded in 2011 by clinical nutritionist Sharon Brown and her chef husband Reb. Born after bone broth helped heal their young son's chronic infections, the company became the first USDA Organic frozen broth on the market and has since expanded into shelf-stable cooking broths, paleo soups and heat-and-go keto broth cups. Its products are sold nationwide through Whole Foods, Sprouts, Kroger, Target, Publix and Walmart.
Everytable
Everytable is a Los Angeles-based, mission-driven food company that makes fresh, nutritious meals affordable and accessible to everyone. Built around a central commissary kitchen and small-footprint stores, subscriptions, delivery and refrigerated SmartFridges, the company prices meals by neighborhood - keeping food affordable in communities often treated as food deserts. Founded in 2016 by former Wall Street trader Sam Polk and ex-private-equity executive David Foster, Everytable is a public benefit corporation pioneering a Social Equity Franchise Program to build generational wealth for entrepreneurs of color.
Foodsmart
Foodsmart (formerly Zipongo) is a San Francisco-based telenutrition company that pairs registered dietitians with a food benefits marketplace to treat diet-related chronic disease and food insecurity. It serves more than 2.2 million members across employer plans, Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage and commercial insurers, and in 2024 raised $200M led by TPG's The Rise Fund to expand its 'Foodscripts' food-as-medicine programs with major U.S. health systems.
Kurt Knight
Kurt Knight is the CEO of Foodsmart, the largest digital food-as-medicine platform in the United States, appointed in March 2025 after 13 years at Amwell where he rose to COO and helped scale virtual care nationally. With an MBA from Harvard, an MPH from Columbia, and field experience everywhere from UNICEF to the Gates Foundation to the Boston Consulting Group, Knight brings an unusually wide lens to the intersection of food, nutrition, and healthcare delivery.