Nutrition Reviews

Besides the high demand for convenience and lower prices, there are several key factors driving the rapid growth of direct to consumer telemedicine startups. Here are three:

Rebranding convenience

The majority of D2C nutrition startups have merely repackaged common concepts into more convenient and accessible offerings. As an example, all healthy meal prep delivery companies simply make home cooking a couple steps simpler, while online organic markets like Thrive or Grove Collaborative simply remove a bit of guess work around shopping sustainably online. Neither offers a radically transformative service or product that’s changing what people eat.

Similarly, a lot of D2C nutrition startups have rejiggered existing supply chains to improve customer experience for existing goods. Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market, for instance, save food from the trash by delivering it directly to your door, while alcohol delivery firms Drizly and Saucey sell all the traditional hooch brands you’ve come to love, merely saving you a buzzed jaunt to the corner store.

Overall, D2C startups are growing a ton despite a lack of technological breakthroughs in nutrition. Many claim their products are well supported by science and academic research, but direct to consumerism in nutrition has been – in our humble opinion – mostly driven by innovations in the customer experience than anything else.

Heavy investment in marketing

What’s proved true for new direct to consumer brands in general is also true of D2C nutrition startups: heavy investment in paid media is an effective way to grow brand awareness and acquire new customers. These startups are deploying large ad budgets to stay ahead of the competition, and show a high willingness to pay to acquire new customers. Investor’s dollars are shelled out for social ads, search engine optimization and SEM, as well as robust affiliate programs, and offline channels such as radio and TV.

Attractive introductory offers

Whether it’s a first free month from Noom, free shipping for life, or a week of free meals from Blue Apron, D2C startups in the nutrition space are using eye-catching intro offers to entice consumers. The idea is that once you try their product or service, it’ll be too convenient to give up, kind of like Uber or Lyft. For many in the ecosystem, it’s unclear how sticky their offerings really are, and whether the economics of heavily subsidizing early adoption will pan out in the long-run. But for those in ultra-competitive niches like meal delivery or online vitamin subscriptions, offering health-conscious consumers something for free may be the only way to get noticed.

What markets are top nutrition brands disrupting?

While nutrition is a broad term and encompasses a lot of product categories from food to vitamins to weight-loss and more. Here are a few of the hottest markets that D2C nutrition startups are disrupting:

• Organic health foods
• At-home meal prep
• Weight loss coaching
• Specialty pet food
• Personalized supplement plans
• Alcohol delivery
• Gut health testing

….And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Like most industries, nutrition startups are going direct to consumer, and it’s an incredibly exciting time to be following the space. There’s so much changing that we couldn’t have possibly covered it all — what did we miss? Comment below or drop us a line via email. Let us know if you think we ought to add your favorite D2C nutrition startup to our list. And to discover more amazing startups changing the world as we know it, check out this.