In this new series Food & Drink Business revisits its Rising Star alumni. Our regular Rising Star feature in the print magazine profiles founders and their young companies, selected for innovation, creativity, tenacity, and potential.
This week, we catch up frozen ready meals Be Fit Food’s founder and CEO Kate Save.
The genesis of Be Fit Food occurred when dietician, diabetes educator and exercise physiologist Kate Save realised the hardest part for her clients was following a nutritious meal plan.
I was working as a dietitian, exercise physiologist, and diabetes educator and after about 10 years of clinical practice I realised that no matter how much education, coaching, and fitness training I gave people, the hardest part they struggled with was following a meal plan, meal prepping, and eating the food.
I wanted to help people achieve their goals, so I dug deep into all the nutritionals for the ready meal and meal kit companies on the market.
What I found was the majority were focused on healthy eating, but not on health improvement or changing your health, whether that is reversing your type two diabetes, reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, heart disease, or whatever it might be, including weight loss.
The number one goal when people came to see me as a dietician – even if the primary reason was a recently diagnosed food allergy, or coeliac disease – was wanting to “lose a little bit of weight”.
With all my years of study, I know how easy it can be to lose weight, but I also know how challenging it is for many people, which is generally because they are time poor.
I wanted to take the guesswork out of it, deliver the meals to them and say, “If you just eat these for two weeks on average, you will lose 5.89 kilograms”. That’s what our studies show, but you need to stick to it. Clear out the fridge, freezer, and pantry. Leave the bottom drawer of the fridge, anything in there you can have, all the low starch veggies and salads.
All the science from CSIRO points towards reducing carbohydrates. And now the American Dietician Association is recommending people with Type 2 diabetes reduce their carbohydrate intake because they can exacerbate the condition.
Ed: Save started Be Fit Food in 2014, but it was her appearance on Shark Tank in 2017 that dramatically increased the scale of the business.
When we started there was only a couple of key players in the ready meal market, and they were reasonably small. Then there was the boom and the big players arrived, but their messaging was much more focused on convenience than health. Companies like Lite n Easy, Jenny Craig, and Weight Watchers owned the weight loss category and still do, but they were using older science that stuck to older dietary guidelines.
Around the time we launched, CSIRO released its research about the benefits of a low carb diet for type two diabetes remission.
I could see that no one was taking that scientific research and creating a product. That’s how our relationship with CSIRO began. It had spent millions of dollars on a study with many people, we’d done a study with 10, but we both reached the same outcome: a lower carbohydrate, more plant-based diet – with some animal protein – worked.
CSIRO approached us to create meals to support their science.
More recently there has been a boom with shakes and intermittent fasting. One of the really interesting aspects of this is because products like the Man Shake was the first product on the market targeting men and making them take a real look into weight loss.
Previously, the market had been 90 per cent women. Over the last four to five years, that’s shifted to 60 per cent women, 40 per cent men.
One of the biggest changes we’ve seen is how the messaging around weight loss for men in Australian changed the landscape.
Where is the company today?
What started as a dream to make truly nutritious meals specifically to improve the health of Australians has finally become more accessible as Be Fit Food has created a real revolution in the health food space.
We’ve sold more than three million meals across Australia, and we are in 780 retailers, which includes over 750 Woolworths stores, and then around 35 Richies, IGAs, and independent grocers.
We have just launched in pharmacies, the first ready-made meals company to do so.
This is the realisation of my vision to create food as the first medicine. We have a duty of care to say, “This pill won’t fix your diabetes, but this food will help to fix it while the medication manages the condition”.
We are in a handful of Terry White and Priceline stores and we’ve just gone into our fifth Chemist Warehouse where we have a five metre freezer, which is amazing.
Nobody in Australia ever expected that we could get that amount of space in the chemist warehouse. But they can see our vision, they can see that Australia needs with the diet obesity epidemic.
What have been the high points?
- Winning the Telstra Best of Business Award for Championing Health in Victoria in 2022 and also back in 2018 the Victorian Telstra Business of the Year;
- achieving 145 per cent commercial growth in FY23 compared to FY22;
- generating over $32.1 million revenue in just five years;
- providing over 1000 complimentary dietitian consultations in FY23;
- being accredited for NDIS/homecare, with 70-80 per cent of their meals funded; and
- looking forward, we envision a future where every household has access to our nutritious, easy-to-prepare meals.
Our dedication to healthier living and combating obesity is stronger than ever.
For our company, home care, aged care and the disability sector are top of mind. You have people that are vulnerable, can’t do everything themselves, and are not supported with the right food. We service a lot of people in the NDIS, with 80 per cent of costs covered by the scheme.
The capital we raise from this campaign will enable us to reach new horizons: develop a wider product range, collaborate more closely with academia for cutting-edge research, and continue our significant contribution to the health sector.
What have been the challenges?
- Scaling from five to 63 staff in just four weeks in 2017 as the business grew after featuring on Shark Tank;
- building new website and online platforms to scale our organisation – technology is always a huge investment; and
- hiring a strong team to take us to the next level of growth.
You also need to remember that if you are trying to sell something that’s high quality then you can’t race to the bottom on price.
Ongoing consumer confusion from misleading labelling is also a challenge, something we have known for a long time. Take Health Star Ratings – people don’t understand when you’re looking at a product’s rating it is based on category not product. So, a Greek yoghurt has two stars but a bag of frozen chips has five stars – that is confusing.
There’s no added sugar or artificial sweeteners in any of our products purely because we know it creates addiction in food.
As a dietician, first and foremost in my clinical practice I was always looking for tools to help people stay motivated; if you track your results, you will achieve results.
If you don’t have anything that you can physically and tangibly see, track, and monitor, then you lose motivation because you need those little wins along the way.
One of the tools we use is the myDNA kit. It looks at your fitness and nutrition genes and if you have the obesity gene.
If you do, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be obese, it just means it’s going to be harder for you than someone who doesn’t have it. Also, knowledge is power – if you know you have that gene, then your mindset is, “this is harder for me, so I need to be a bit healthier and a bit more careful every day. It certainly doesn’t determine your destiny; it just makes things a little bit more challenging.
There’s also a gene for appetite control – some people are snackers, some people eat main meals and don’t get hungry in between. Again, once you know, you can structure your day for success.
We also partnered with BodyMapp, which do 3D body scans. What is important to me is not your weight, because weight does not dictate your health. BodyMapp measures the circumference of every part of your body.
It then creates an avatar of you, which can be confronting! But it shows you where the weight is and when you are achieving change. That doesn’t always show on the scales because body fat is like basketball, it has very little weight, but it takes up a lot of space in the body. Whereas if you’re losing muscle, it shot puts.
You might be seeing changes on the scales, but when you put the tape around yourself, you are not losing the basketballs – you’re not losing much space in your body. So, it’s really important for body fat changes to be taking measurements because you want to see your circumference changes.
The technology is incredible, and anyone can use it. It is completely safe for anyone to use and you do it from your phone in the comfort of your home.
And we’re working with Vively, which provides continuous blood glucose monitoring. The benefit for someone who is pre-diabetic is they can see what happens to their blood sugar levels when they eat certain foods, are stressed, have had a lot to drink or too much caffeine. It’s a reminder to manage what you’re eating or doing to prevent your blood sugar spiking.
There is a misconception that certain foods are healthy or unhealthy based on its macronutrients, carbs, fat, or protein.
At the end of the day, inside our own bodies, we have quite different reactions to food – we don't all have the same reaction to one cup of rice or pasta.
We will all have a very different reaction and that comes down to our genetics, metabolism, age, and body composition. But it's important for us to know what that cup of cup of rice does to our blood sugar levels – how long is it elevated, when does it come back down. Then we can choose the timing of our meals or the portioning of those high carbohydrate foods better.
You might find that if you have two tablespoons of rice at every meal, you get a normal blood sugar level response and won't stimulate too much of the fat storage hormone insulin, which means you won't gain weight from that food.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
Trust my gut on decisions as often persuaded by those I look up to, even though the context may not fit, and experience may not reflect our own business growth journey.
Current goals?
- To expand our pharmacy footprint;
- national TV program about health transformation and a digital channel to support this;
- to expand our retail range in the major supermarkets; and
- to build our online presence and create a new website to support this growth including a subscription and recurring revenue model.
