* * * * *

Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.

* * * * *

World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We’re an all-in-one food tool that allows you to organize recipes, make meal plans and shopping lists and track your intake with a helpful AI assistant.”

Company: MyFoodPlanit

Location: Seattle, Washington

Year founded: 2023

Website/App: https://myfoodplanit.com/

Funding round to date: “It’s self-funded at this point. I have two business partners who have put in a little bit of money, but most of it is self-funded. We haven’t done any type of funding rounds or anything like that.”

Who are your investors? “We’ve put in about $130,000 so far.”

Are you looking for more investment? “Yes, definitely.”

Tell us about yourself, founder Ryan Chapman: “I was overweight and had poor nutrition growing up, and all the way through college was pretty overweight. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and went into mechanical engineering for about 10 years. Back in 2003-04, I lost 100 pounds. I got into triathlons and started doing well in them and got fit for the first time. I started finding a passion for coaching other people. I did that in school, I used to tutor math and things like that and have always been a tutoring/coaching helping kind of person, I enjoy doing that stuff. I started helping people with triathlons, helping people with nutrition and food. That morphed into starting a brand called 90/10 Nutrition, which we’ve got a food blog and a way of eating healthy. I’ve been running that since 2015. I quit my engineering job back in 2012 and started doing all that kind of stuff. Through that, we morphed into doing MyFoodPlanit from what we learned in 90/10 Nutrition.”

Who are your co-founders/partners? “One partner is Heidi Boortz. She is also my partner in 90/10 Nutrition and that happened because she started doing 90/10 Nutrition, which was my brainchild in 2012-13, and did really well with it. She started doing meal plans for people that were doing my 90/10 Nutrition program and I ended up hiring her and partnering with her to do meal planning for that brand. She’s been my business partner since.”

How does your platform work? “It’s a subscription-based platform, and it allows you to organize all of your recipes. You can import recipes or enter recipes, so if you have them on paper you can put them in there. You can tag them, organize them however you want. You have all your recipes in one place. That’s the first part of the platform. From there, you can drag and drop all of those recipes onto a meal planning calendar and move them around and make yourself an actual meal plan. You can then select a date range in the shopping list generator and it will pull all the ingredients out of everything that’s in that date range on your meal plan and create a shopping list in just a few clicks for you. We have an Instacart integration that allows you to take that shopping list, upload it directly to Instacart and shop or you can print it, email it or head to the store. The last part is the tracking. Going through the whole process of planning and then tracking your progress. You’re able to take all of the stuff from your meal plan or anything else you eat and put it into a food diary and get all of your metrics, like macros and all that good stuff. For sports, a lot of people are tracking their macros specifically to try to obtain a particular goal whether it be in weight gain or weight loss or body composition. This will help you track all of these things. The difference being a lot of those other things out there can help you track your food and put it in. This starts at the planning stage so you can plan your food and then track it, not just put it in after you consumed it essentially. You can plan what you’re going to consume and then put it, and it goes right into the food diary where you see all the metrics on your stuff.”

What problem is your company solving? “Simplifying the process of organizing, planning and tracking your food. It’s one app for everything. A lot of apps do good with food planning, so you can organize your recipes and make a meal plan and make a shopping list. But then the tracking of your macros and the nutrition side of things is not there. There are great apps that do the tracking of the nutrition and are not great with the planning. It’s one thing, instead of having to go with several different apps to do what you want to do.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We have two levels. One is with the AI assistant and one is without the AI assistant. It’s $9.95 a month without, and it’s $12.49 a month with it. We have yearly options as well that are discounted if you want to pay one year at a time, like you see on a lot of other things. There are a lot of people who could benefit from this, but based on past stuff it’s a lot of families, those with children who are trying to do meal planning and take kids all over the place. Busy professionals would be another target audience. People who are very busy but tend to eat out a lot but would like to get into meal planning and need the simplification of that.”

How are you marketing your product? “Mostly through influencers, food bloggers and things like that. We’re trying to work with fitness and food influencers.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We have no problem with scale. We can take on a whole bunch of customers at once with the way we have this set up. I’m shooting for about 10,000 users in the first year of our operation.”

Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “There are probably two to three major meal planners out there that are pretty direct competitors to us. The issue with all of them is they don’t do the tracking piece. You can make a meal plan, print out a shopping list and go to the store, but once you’ve consumed the food there’s no tracking of, ‘What did I consume?’ And if you consume something that isn’t on your meal plan, like a Snickers bar, that’s not there in that tool. They are great for dragging and dropping recipes and creating a meal plan and shopping list, but they don’t have that tracking piece nor the AI piece. I haven’t seen anybody else doing AI stuff in this space yet. MyFitnessPal is probably one of our biggest competitors and they do the tracking side of things. I know tons of people who use MyFitnessPal to input their daily stuff, they’ve got this huge database of users entering food so you can find just about anything you eat on there. They don’t have the planning side. You’ve got to piece it together. You might use one for meal planning, get your meal plan, and use the other one to see how you did on your calories and macros.”

What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “It’s taking the whole process from planning to tracking. No one has done that yet. I’ve seen a lot of the stuff in the AI space that is like, ‘Woo hoo, there’s AI, let’s have it do stuff.’ For this particular space, a lot of people are just having the AI create recipes. They’re untested recipes. It’s like this AI taking this stuff out of its knowledge base and creating this recipe no one has ever tried before. You don’t know if it’s going to work. We have a way of using AI to find and help you curate actual recipes that have been tested and from the internet, rather than just hallucinating recipes out of thin air like a lot of this AI stuff we see.”

What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just launched Oct. 4. That’s our first big milestone.”

What are the values that are core to your brand? “This came from us doing 90/10 Nutrition for the last eight years. It flows from that, which is making healthy eating easier to understand and more accessible for people. Meal planning was a recurring theme throughout those last eight years working with people. Meal planning and tracking was something people wanted and didn’t know how to do well and didn’t have the right apps for it. Making healthy eating easier and more accessible for people is what we’re about.”

What does success ultimately look like for your company? “We’d like to make a decent living helping people eat healthy. We’re not working to become the next MyFitnessPal or anything like that but we’d like to have a nice core group of people who love the app and use it to help themselves eat healthier or eat whatever way they enjoy eating in an easy way and make a good living at it.”

What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “Having the life experience I’ve had through the fitness and nutrition world is helpful for people to know. Losing 100 pounds, getting into triathlons, I’ve done a couple of Full Ironmans and helped other people do them. I changed from a good career to help other people learn how to do this kind of stuff. I have a real passion for healthy eating, meal planning and fitness and nutrition, in general.”

What level of crossover is there between the meal planning industry and the athletic world? “For people who are trying to perform well in sports, anyone who does well in that type of stuff will tell you that nutrition is key. I was just discussing Ironmans, half Ironmans and marathons, and nutrition is a much higher percentage of success in that than most people realize. Not just in race nutrition, but also your nutrition while you’re training. That helps with body composition and performance. There are a lot of people doing that kind of stuff who would benefit from having something that could help track all that kind of stuff.”