TrainingMeals Nutrition Coach sets athletes up for top performance and swift recovery through a personalized eating plan based on your sport, your size and your goals. Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other […]
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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.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “You worry about your training. We worry about your training meals. We worry about your nutrition.”
Company: TrainingMeals Nutrition Coach
Location: New York, New York
Year founded: 2019
Website/App: https://mytrainingmeals.com/https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mytrainingmeals.app&hl=en_US&gl=UShttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/trainingmeals-nutrition-coach/id1580712526
Funding round to date: “Self-funded.”
Who are your investors? “I’m the investor and we’ve raised about half a million dollars.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Not necessarily right now.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO & founder Gary Jomrich: “I'm a typical immigrant. I came to the United States in 2000 and worked for a large Swedish company. Slowly started my first company in the food industry, had a couple of restaurants in New York. By 2010, I started a consulting firm in the food industry, which is still running. We basically import European products into the United States. I'm a vivid triathlete, and I'm also a very untypical triathlete. I'm short and thick. For that reason, nutrition for me is super important, especially when I train. Basically, just keep my energy levels and my performance up. It's all about recovery, really. I couldn't really find anything that really helped me. So, in 2019, when I trained for an Ironman in Austria in Carinthia, I decided to basically build my own app and my own platform that is actually an online nutrition coach—and not just a macro or calorie counter.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “I’m the main founder. My wife, Klara, is my co-founder. She’s a sports nutritionist.”
How does your service work? “We analyze an athlete. We offer some 130-135 sports with different positions. If you're a football player, it's not limited to the sport of football, but you also can enter lineman or wide receiver. Based on your personal data, your age, your height, your weight, what season you are in—are you in an offseason or a training season? Or are you tapering or are you having a game every weekend?—and based on that, we measure your daily caloric output, look at your planned workouts and finished workouts and provide you with the exact amount of macros and micros and calories you need to recover perfectly. We also very much consider nutrition, nutritionally scientific facts like blueberries and antioxidants, for instance. Our food is there to make you recover better, to help your body recover better, so you can go out the next day and feel better and do it again.”
What problem is your company solving? “We are doing the same job a paid nutritionist does, including not only telling an athlete, ‘Hey, this is the combination of macros you need to eat,’ but we also get them the exact recipes to achieve that. They're actually going to have an exact combination of ingredients they can cook. We're not an after-the-fact company, but we just go, ‘OK, so here's your 10K run at a high-intensity training and now eat, let’s say, 30% of protein.’ That's what we do. We also go and say, ‘Hey, this is the amount of calories you need to eat and this is the exact recipe you need to cook to achieve that throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the year, including shopping lists, including links to Amazon Fresh and so on, so you can order your food online.’ ”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “With an annual subscription, it’s $11.99, so $1 per month. There are certain tiers. With a three-month subscription, it’s $5.99 and if you choose to do a one-month subscription, it’s $3.99. Our target customer is basically anybody who's serious about sports, and serious about performance. We're not so terribly interested in the typical Instagram model. What's important for us is anybody who wants to perform. There's quite a bit of food you need to eat because in order to perform you need to actually consume the appropriate amount of calories, and that does not necessarily lend to the typical model look, for lack of a better expression. People like April Zilg, a paddler, for instance, or Anna Willett, triathlete, super successful. We are working with a Kenyan runner, who does like a 2:15 marathon and wants to come down to 2:05. These are people that don't necessarily get paid all the sponsorship money they would need to have, but we basically solve their nutrition problem by only charging a buck a month and essentially providing the same service.”
How are you marketing your product? “ASO (App Store Optimization) is really the biggest part. That is about 80% of our new business. Online marketing, Facebook, Google. Once we have established ourselves a little bit better, then we're also going to do some boots-on-the-ground marketing, being at races, being at events. We are also intending to have opinion leaders to work with people. We potentially will sponsor events and athletes. We want to show them, ‘Hey, this is what TrainingMeals can be a part of.’”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “Our current level of growth is in the hundreds and thousands of percent, but also because we just launched. So if we wouldn't be there, then it would be a silly thing. We do hope by the end of the year to have some between 1,000-2,000 new subscribers every month, and that would be a healthy growth, and then we just try to expand this. Measurements are actually quite simple. We are tracking all our new subscriptions, we are tracking through the Facebooks, the Googles, and they provide you with all different kinds of measurements, and we just add it all in one place and look at them. We are then seeing, OK, what works? What doesn't work? And then adjust our communication or marketing accordingly.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “The big boy in the group is obviously MyFitnessPal, which is a great company. They were founded more than a decade ago and bought by Under Armour a few years ago. They’re doing a good job. Other competitors – there’s actually an app called Nutrition Coach. They have been on the market quite a bit longer than we have but the big difference is they are mostly macro counters and calorie counters. We are actually a nutritionist. We actually analyze and measure an athlete's daily life and output, and use that to actually predict what an athlete will have to eat in the future. That can be tomorrow, that can be in a week, that can be in a year. If you give us your data, then we are going to know what you are going to have to eat that day.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “Our secret sauce is really our background technology. There's a lot going on in the background in order to calculate and measure the exact amount of food. We have proprietary systems to measure nutritional data of any kind of ingredient. We are a very science-based company. There is no voodoo. This is all based in nutrition science, what we are doing. But since we basically jammed everything into a code, we really can measure our calculations. Our code is really what gets the perfect outcome for the athlete. We are basically predicting what they will need.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “The first big milestone was in December, our app and web launch. The next milestone is going to be integration of more than one market platform. Right now, we are working with Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods. But we're going to be expanding to Kroger, Safeway, Stop & Shop.”
In what ways have you adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic? “Not at all, really. We tried to launch in fall of 2020.
The launch didn't go well, and I'm not sure if it was COVID or it was a system that was not quite as good as it is now. I would propose it's probably going to be something that’s a little bit of both. But we went on doing what we were doing and improved it. I had the fortune to talk to the founder of Runtastic, who sold to Adidas years ago. He basically said, ‘Well, the only chance you have is if you have the best app, the best product out there in the market.’ We worked very hard to get there, and I believe we are now.”
Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “Founding a company and coding your company cost a lot of money, so financial considerations are always a major topic. Technology is a major topic. We are using so many different API's, from Amazon Fresh to Garmin to Polar to TrainingPeaks to Apple Health to Google Fit. And getting all that external data coming in and consolidated on our platform is absolutely a challenge because they all come in a little bit differently. You just have to make sure that all fits in this one platform and works for the athletes. That was a major challenge. The creativity of creating recipes. You want to offer something to eat that actually tastes great, otherwise people won't want to eat it. I think our recipes are super tasty. We are not missionaries, we don't go like, ‘Oh my God, you have to eat vegan or you have to eat vegetarian or now you only have to go keto.’ We can do all of those things, but we are not telling anybody to do that. We are just aiming to have recipes that really fit your needs. Same goes for allergies, obviously, or if you have gluten intolerance, whatever it might be.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “We greatly care about our athletes. So much so that we want them to absolutely love our platform so they share it —because [it’s] part of our marketing book. We believe strongly that using our platform is going to make you a much-better athlete. At our core, we do want people to use a reliable science base. I think science-based is a really strong measurement for us because there is just so much out there right now that we don't really agree with, and we need our athletes to understand what we are offering actually has been tested, proven, researched and tested again. This is what we are doing. It's a very scientifically researched program. It's important for us that we create a real benefit for our athletes. A further milestone is going to be that we are going to create discounts for our athletes when they go shopping. So, eventually, the app is actually going to make them money because we are working with larger retailers, and we're going to have a customer base that's larger. We want to be a solution to nutrition for athletes and also their families because they don't only have to cook the food for themselves. There's a function in there where it’s like, ‘Hey, cook for more than one person,’ they can click it for say four people, and then they're going to get the recipes blown up to four people.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “I want to be very realistic about it because there is a financial part of it and there is an ideological part of it. We want people to recover better, to be able to get up the next day and after six hours of riding on Saturday they should be able to get up and run three hours on a Sunday. We want to be part of that because we can help, and nutrition is just such a black hole in industry. Everybody does the training planning. Nobody really has nutrition planning because it's really expensive. That's one thing. We just want to be economically feasible. We, obviously, would like to build this and turn this into something like MyFitnessPal has become. But, quite frankly, at such a launch stage, we obviously have a business plan, but at a launch stage it's just a really hard thing. What I would love to see is a million users in the United States. Once I get that, I will be super happy. That's going to make my day, my year.”
What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “I studied at the University of Vienna, and I've been a serial entrepreneur. Since I came to the United States in 2000, this is my fifth company, and all my companies are still in existence one way or the other. I might not own them anymore, but the companies have been built so they’re still sustaining. What I combined with this business is my passion for sports with my passion about food and my passion about building companies. That's the reason why if this goes to hell in a handbasket, I will still be proud to have built it because it's such a cool thing.”
What are the challenges in differentiating your product in the crowded fitness and nutrition markets? “It is inherently difficult to get attention, right? Once you do have attention, we find people really love what we're doing because we’re just so different in this market space. But getting the initial attention—if you do an app store search for nutrition, there are all different kinds of things showing up first. The technological part is inherently difficult. Once an athlete gets or takes the time to actually go through it and check it out, they tend to stick with us because it really solves a problem.”
Do you have a favorite quote about leadership? “What’s really important, and I’m a little bit following Whole Foods here, is that we are trying to improve life and potential of life, first for our staff, for our employees, then for our athletes, then for our shareholders, which in that case is me. It’s really near and dear to me that our staff, the ones working for us, that this gets them somewhere in life. I only can do so much, and I'm only as good as the people I work with. So, I'm trying to really hold on to those guys.”
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