BASF enters personalized health analytics collaboration with Segterra
15 Sep 2017 --- BASF and Segterra have initiated a collaboration with BASF’s health ingredients brand, Newtrition, to provide personalized nutrition recommendations and scientific support for InsideTracker, an online platform developed by Segterra. InsideTracker is a platform for personalized health analytics in the US market. It is said to track and analyze blood biomarkers and applies algorithms and scientific databases to recommend personalized plans for optimizing an individual’s health.
As part of this collaboration, BASF will use its scientific capabilities to provide personalized nutrition and dietary supplementation recommendations to InsideTracker for its analysis of the blood biomarker results in the US.
“At a time when people have access to a plethora of personal biometric data but very little actionable guidance on how to best put that data to use, InsideTracker was created to empower the personalized nutrition revolution,” says Rony Sellam, Segterra CEO.
Personal nutrition an ongoing concern
This move is BASF’s latest in its pursuit of new opportunities in the personalized nutrition space. “The desire to stay healthy and active for as long as possible is a universal aspiration that virtually all of us share. At BASF, we believe that personalized nutrition can really make an impact here – today,” Simon Strauch, Director Global Marketing, BASF Human Nutrition, tells The World of Food Ingredients in the journal’s July/August issue.
“The right consumer needs and behaviors already exist, science and technology are continuously advancing, and EU-funded projects such as food4me underline personalized nutrition’s broad social relevance,” Strauch continues. “All over the world, consumers are joining the trend for ‘the quantified self,’ as they track their behavior via wearable technology and smartphone apps. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly interested in using food as a tool to boost their performance, health and well-being, and this is impacting their behavior online too.”
“Putting all of this together, we believe that personalized nutrition is not something for tomorrow or the future – its time is now,” Strauch asserts.
Aiming for state-of-the-art platform
InsideTracker is catering to the personalized nutrition category through an online subscription service offering what BASF calls “personalized, actionable recommendations for nutrition, exercise, dietary supplements and lifestyle.”
Through Newtrition scientific capabilities, BASF asserts that the InsideTracker platform will be enhanced to better enable users to optimize their intake of dietary supplements for improvement of health and prevention of diseases along all stages of life. “Our team’s commitment has always been to put science first, and we have a solid collaboration with BASF and its global team of 10,000 employees in R&D,” adds Gil Blander, Segterra founder and CSO.
Looking to nutrition’s future
BASF notes that the efforts between BASF’s Newtrition brand and InsideTracker are trying to cultivate an ecosystem that delivers personalized nutrition to end-consumers seeking to achieve their individual health goals with data-driven recommendations. It also says the collaboration offers the opportunity for BASF to improve its insights on consumer needs and, accordingly, develop appropriate solutions for the market under the Newtrition brand.
“We are committed to building collaborations that empower us to tap into consumer demands and deliver the right nutrients to the right people at the right time, using Newtrition science-based competencies,” says Strauch. “The collaboration with InsideTracker presents an opportunity to invite our customers to join the ecosystem and together create valuable advancements for the future of nutrition,” adds François Scheffler, who heads BASF’s Global Human Nutrition and Pharma Solutions Businesses.
By Paul Creasy
