The real world can put your life priorities to the test. When you’re busy juggling work, family obligations and friend time, it’s all too easy to drop the ball on making time for healthy lifestyle choices. Lighter, a startup that's been bouncing around the Boston area the last couple of years, has developed a platform to help people stay on top of their meal planning, prep and overall nutrition. And since Micah Risk and Alexis Fox launched Lighter in 2013, the venture has been become a Boston company with a distinctly global vision for changing how we eat.
Lighter's journey has touched almost every corner of the Boston area. Fox explained, “I met Micah at the Thinking Cup on Tremont… A couple of cups of coffee later and we went into business together.”
There's so much energy and momentum going into solving problems surrounding what we eat.
After their initial coffee meeting, Fox and Risk built the foundation for their company predominantly from O2 Yoga in Harvard Square. Once they received funding, Lighter set up shop in NGIN Workplace in Kendall Square - until they doubled in headcount and felt like they outgrew the space. Up next was Brooklyn Boulders in Somerville, where the team took climbing breaks from work and adopted their “yoga chic” dress code (which has since been tweaked). Most recently, the startup moved into the coworking space Hatch Fenway, and even though Fox claims “the swing sets weren’t a draw," she’s actually come to like them.
And after all this time, despite some of Lighter’s West Coast investors' nudges for the startup to move to the Valley, they’ve opted to remain in Boston. Fox said:
Fenway is about to explode when it comes to startups, and we’re excited to be on the ground level when it does… There’s something about Boston that feels like home. It’s a smaller town where you can get to work easily, workout easily and escape to nature easily. It has a manageable community and access to the greatest minds in the world.
“There’s so much going on with food and technology,” Risk, a graduate of Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, added. “It’s an intersection of everything important to us as a company.”
In addition to switching up their commercial real estate, Lighter has made other adjustments over the past couple of years. Take, for instance, its platform.
The main functionality hasn’t changed: Users log on and have access to information and recommendation from food leaders, who range from athletes and nutrition experts to working professionals and parents. After also taking into account users’ dietary requirements - like food allergies, personal cuisine preferences and nutrition goals - Lighter automatically generates a grocery list and plant-based recipes for them to use.
“Relearning what to eat can be daunting and overwhelming,” Risk said. “We’re putting it all together in one place for them.”
Here’s where certain aspects are different compared to when Lighter initially launched. It had to take a respite from offering its grocery delivery service to figure out logistics while it globally scaled. But the team is planning on relaunching that functionality soon.
Fox and Risk also shared they’re releasing new features, such as instructional video components to recipes. Lighter has partnered with a culinary education company, whose name they’re not yet ready to disclose, to create these videos that will help users learn different cooking techniques. Also in the works? A feature that will give users the full nutritional information for recipes.
And while people can use the platform to access personalized recipes and grocery lists for free, additional features, like the ones mentioned above, are available through paid memberships. For example, the Empowered Membership, which is $14 per month, lets you save recipes and adjust servings. Meanwhile, the Elevated Membership allows users to receive unlimited cooking and nutrition guidance, among other perks, for $34 a month.
"We've seen monumental changes for food, especially in the last three to five years," Fox told us. "There's so much energy and momentum going into solving problems surrounding what we eat. We want to make the entire movement as efficient and effective as possible with software."
