Food-as-medicine startup Chiyo helps postpartum moms with nutrition after raising $3 million

Image credits: Chiyo / Chiyo co-founders Irene Liu and Jennifer Jolorte Doro

One of the most difficult things to do during pregnancy is learning what to eat to make your digestion comfortable and get the most nutrition. Once the baby is born, the nutritional guessing game ensues about the best foods for postpartum and breastfeeding.

Chiyo As part of our holistic approach to infertility treatment, we want to be that support system by providing nutrition advice and meals in the form of a meal delivery service to women from fertility through postpartum. Chiyo provides users with digital guides and health coaching, and is also working on building what it believes is the “first-of-its-kind” research database on nutrition for women’s health.

Co-founder and CEO Irene Liu came up with the idea for Chiyo after watching her mother send her aunt a traditional Chinese medicine meal after she gave birth. Liu has always been interested in the concept of food as medicine and hopes to combine her nutrition background with Eastern food therapy to create stage-based, symptom-specific nutrition programs for other mothers. I did.

“My family is Taiwanese and I have always been interested in a more holistic medical approach and how to use food to prevent disease, heal and feel better – more functional foods. I grew up with that mindset,” Liu told TechCrunch. “After seeing what postpartum care is like in Asia and other older cultures, I wondered why this doesn’t exist in the U.S. If your body is going to continue to change, then lifestyle really matters. Why not use functional foods in this way?”

never ending pilot

Liu began her career at Bain & Co., where she understood the economics of the food system, and then worked at a nonprofit on Chicago’s South Side, launching a local grocery store route. Combining his interest in food as medicine with a policy degree from Harvard University and a business administration degree from Wharton, Mr. Liu is committed to building a thriving regional economy through economic development initiatives. It gave me an opportunity to think about how we can make our food system more supportive. itself.

She met co-founder Jennifer Giorte d’Oro, a clinical nutritionist and postpartum private chef. They initially launched a pilot program to deliver a five-week postpartum meal to new mothers in New York City.

As Liu says, the pilot had no end. Meanwhile, the company’s website grew organically on his Google, and the pair began receiving thousands of pre-orders. “All of this was flying by the seat of your pants just to ship the product,” Liu said.

Chiyo’s postpartum nutrition program provides three meals a day. (Image provided by: Chiyo)

So they founded Chiyo in 2020 and began shipping meals across the country from their kitchen in Kearney, New Jersey. The co-founders liked the idea of ​​a company that served physical meals rather than just digital ones. That’s because selling a product gives you “richer data” about how people use it.

The company has served 100,000 meals since launching in 2021 and has seen revenue increase 300% in the past 12 months across the U.S., but Liu declined to say what the actual revenue figures were. avoided. Additionally, Chiyo collaborates with her more than 100 female healthcare workers.

Our product roadmap is also evolving, expanding from postpartum programs and ultimately contributing to the entire women’s health journey. This includes a menstrual cycle fertility program that sends tonics and soups based on your menstrual cycle. Your postpartum diet will then change based on your due date.

And unlike other meal service providers who want you to be a customer for life, Chiyo’s goal is to take you out of its program. The average user uses the program for about 4 weeks. The 40-day postpartum program includes three meals a day and starts at $69 per day.

“We’ve become more prescriptive about the timing of what affects the body,” Liu says. “For example, we started with a program for the first 40 days postpartum. We then started to frame and understand what’s going on in your body within six weeks postpartum and what’s really important. For example, we’ve seen an increase in our customers even after two weeks of postpartum recovery.”

Next up: Self-guided nutrition

The company currently aims to build a digital platform for personalized customer self-guided content and nutrition programs. Ultimately, users will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of each solution and contribute to a research database on nutrition for women’s health.

This is backed by $3 million in new investment led by early stage investor Bread & Butter Ventures. Other participants in the round include Ingeborg, Union Heritage Ventures, Peterson Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Palette Ventures, and The Helm.

The company has now raised a total of $3.4 million. Other backers include fashion blogger and designer Amy Song and Elizabeth Crystal, former chief financial officer of restaurant chain Momofuku. Jing of Fly by Jing and Vanessa Dew, co-founder of Health-Ade.

The new funding will also allow Chiyo to expand distribution through its clinic and practitioner community and invest in additional food products as medical research.

“From all of this work, we are committed to proving the ROI of our investments in reducing nutrition and health care costs, and ultimately ensuring that this program is reimbursed and requires no out-of-pocket payments.” ” said Liu. “We also work with a number of clinics and hospital systems on how to be a nutrition plug-in. If a patient has questions about nutrition or would like more nutritional support, this is our co-branded entry point into the ecosystem.”

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