Improving Access to Healthcare and Food Security in the U.S.: An Interview with Jared Scharen of Foodsmart

By Christa Styrkowicz, Kellogg School of Management ‘22

Jared Scharen is a 2017 Kellogg alum and current Vice President of Marketing at Foodsmart, a telenutrition network that makes healthy eating easy, accessible, and affordable. Foodsmart is a holistic telenutrition platform that includes consultation with registered dieticians, personalized meal planning, integration with online grocery shopping, and targeted food subsidies to help over 1.2 million people get on track with a healthier lifestyle and create long-term behavior change. I sat down with Jared to discuss the pandemic’s impact on telenutrition trends and the future of Foodsmart.

Christa Styrkowicz: There are a number of telenutrition and healthy eating apps out there – what makes Foodsmart unique to your members?

Jared Scharen: We have started to see some smaller companies who are just focused on telenutrition and you also have some of the bigger players like Teladoc where telenutrition is a core component of their product. What all these players are missing, though, is the ongoing support that creates behavior change outside of those telehealth appointments. Seeing a registered dietician through telehealth on its own is great, but if you don’t have something to reinforce that behavior, you’ll make very small changes, and that is where our differentiators come into play.

We have a meal planning tool, thousands of recipes, the ability to personalize those recipes, and integration built into online grocery ordering. That means that someone can create a meal plan with fresh recipes, which is translated automatically into a grocery list with pre-proportioned ingredients, which is then connected to online grocery ordering through Instacart, Walmart, Amazon Fresh – all done in 5 minutes. No one else can do that today.

CS: We have been living in a pandemic for almost a year now – what trends have you observed in your customer base and how have their needs evolved?

JS: The first is that online grocery ordering has grown substantially. Fifty percent of people are now using online grocery ordering and almost forty percent of new online grocery orderers are people over the age of 60. Online grocery ordering went from something that a small, generally healthy, millennial population was using to something that many people are now using regularly. Online grocery ordering is expected to stick because it saves a couple hours a week versus going to the grocery store.

The second is the adoption of telehealth. Around fifty percent of people have used telehealth during the pandemic in some way, shape, or form. Whereas before, seeing a registered dietician or clinician over telehealth would have seemed like a foreign concept, people have now embraced it as the new normal.

CS: What are some of the areas you see Foodsmart growing in the long-term? What are some of the more near-term initiatives you are most excited about in the coming year?

JS: Let me talk about the short-term first – right now we are focusing a lot on food insecurity. Health plans have been talking about social determinants of health (SDOH) for a while but we’re now seeing a lot of employers start to focus on SDOH and food insecurity, which we’ve never seen before. We're focused on helping employers to not just identify people are who food insecure, but also to measure food insecurity over time, because they are struggling on both these dimensions today.

The more long-term question is how we create sustainable ways to address food insecurities. In the short-term, we are doing things like adding automatic price comparisons between grocery stores so people can see which is the cheapest option. We’re also thinking about how we can leverage subsidies from health plans and employers for things like Walmart Plus, which is a service that just launched to deliver Walmart groceries for free to people who live in a food desert. We’re really trying to create long-term solutions for food insecurity that are sustainable, so that health plans and employers aren’t just paying for every single meal.

Lastly, we’re interested in care coordination and in particular, we’re exploring how to work with providers so that they are referring people to food prescriptions and food-as-medicine as a front line of defense versus going to medicine first.

CS: To wrap things up, what is something you have learned since working at Foodsmart and what is your favorite part about working there?

JS: One thing I’ve learned is what we call refrigerator behavioral economics – in order to create long-term change, you need to put healthier foods in front of you and make them more accessible. We do things like encourage users to put their fruits and vegetables at eye-level in the fridge so they are the first thing you reach for instead of letting them rot in the bottom drawer. We focus a lot on food behavioral economics which has been interesting for me.

My favorite part of working at Foodsmart is the level of impact I have working for a mission-driven organization. Even when I need to work long hours, I’m always able to look back and say that we are helping tens of thousands of people on a daily basis to eat better and we are truly impacting their lives. We've recently been putting out clinical publications that show how much we are helping people with their weight, A1C levels, and blood pressure. Our product is making a change in this country, so working at a place where everyone is aligned with that mission is really inspiring.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christa Styrkowicz is a first year 2Y MBA student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. At Kellogg, Christa serves as a board member of a local nonprofit and a Director of Kellogg's Healthcare Conference Startup and Growth Fair. Prior to Kellogg, Christa worked at Deloitte Consulting in their digital health practice as a strategy and analytics consultant. In this role, she partnered with life science companies to ideate, build, and launch innovative digital health products for patients, providers, and researchers. Christa is passionate about using technology and behavioral science to motivate patients to change their behavior and ultimately improve outcomes.