FitNatic Nourish delivers custom supplement blends on demand
Sound familiar Tracking your nutrition--everything from vitamins and herbs to minerals and other nutrients--is a lot of work. But FitNatic's new product, Nourish, is looking to fix this with its convenient, customized supplement blend delivery system. They launched an Indieogo campaign today to bring the product to market.
The Nourish is a counter-top device that uses your personal stats and data pulled from fitness trackers, sleep trackers, and calorie-counting apps to create personalized powdered blends of vitamins, herbs, minerals, and other supplements at timed intervals throughout the day. The blends are not only customized to you and your activity level, they're also customized based on time of day; for example, an early-morning blend might include caffeine, while an evening blend will not.
In a sense, the Nourish is sort of like having a dedicated nutritionist who follows you around and bugs you to drink this custom shake they just whipped up for you.
The Nourish looks a little like a high-tech coffee-maker-slash-arcade-machine. The device is big and boxy, with rounded corners and a large 15-inch touchscreen that rises to deliver your custom blend. Blends are dispensed into a special funnel, which is designed to sit flat on a table yet still work as a funnel (the funnel is basically two pieces of silicone that part when you press the sides of the cup).
Sixteen pods containing different supplements sit on top of the Nourish. The device will come with a 16-pod starter pack, but you'll be able to buy additional pods directly from the company or through partner distributors such as GNC. Each pod is surrounded by a circle of colored lights. The lights serve two purposes: They're color-coded based on type of supplement (herbs are one color, minerals are another, etc), and they also give you a visual demonstration of how much of each supplement remains.
The Nourish's touchscreen works as the device's main hub, where you can see everything from your personal data (including activity tracker info) to exactly how much of each supplement is left in the machine. The Nourish is Wi-Fi and NFC-enabled and will launch with an iOS app, so you'll also be able to see this info on your phone (and your Apple Watch). From the touchscreen/app, you'll be able to dispense blends and pre-dispense blends for later in the day (if you want to take it with you to work -- the Nourish is big enough that it won't be travel-friendly). The Nourish will support multiple user profiles, so the whole family can get on the custom supplement train.
FitNatic tells me they're targeting a very specific demographic with the Nourish: CrossFit moms. They reason that mothers who do CrossFit are supplement users who don't have the time or energy to do all the legwork themselves, and the Nourish will allow them to stay on a fairly regimented supplement schedule without detracting from their home life.
Why this matters: If you're a CrossFit mom, the Nourish might be for you. If you're not a CrossFit mom, or a similarly time-deficient workout-a-holic, the Nourish probably isn't going to sway you into the world of supplements.
Don't get me wrong; there are definitely benefits to a device like the Nourish, albeit mostly convenience related. If you're already a supplement user, you know that keeping track of your nutrition (even if you already use activity trackers and apps such as MyFitnessPal) can get tricky, especially if you have a hectic and unpredictable schedule. And it's certainly nice to outsource the mental math to a machine. At the same time, if you're already a supplement user, you know that tracking your nutrition isn't exactly difficult (and it quickly becomes second-nature), and you probably already have a pretty decent supplement system working for you, based on your own research and trial-and-error.
The Nourish will cost $500 ($400 if you back the company's Indiegogo campaign), including a starter kit of 16 pods (approximately a one-month supply). Individual pods will be sold separately for $8 to $20 through FitNatic and partner stores.