Is This Weight Loss Company Coming for WW And Noom's Market Share?

For many people, the coronavirus pandemic has changed their nutrition and exercise habits. One app helping people track their food and lose weight is called Lifesum. This private startup has scaled rapidly to 45 million users and boasts partnerships with popular tech companies. Should investors be watching Lifesum to take market share from WW International (WW -3.02%) and Noom?

Fool.com's Healthcare and Cannabis Bureau Chief Corinne Cardina chatted with Lifesum's CEO Henrik Torstensson about the digital health and wellness space.

Corinne Cardina: Hello, Henrik, how are you?

Henrik Torstensson: Hi, I'm good. How are you?

Cardina: I'm so good. I am Corinne Cardina. I'm the Bureau Chief of Healthcare and Cannabis on fool.com. Fools, I've got with me today Henrik Torstensson, CEO of Lifesum, a digital health service. Henrik, did I say your name right?

Torstensson: It's Henrik, it's good.

Cardina: Great. We are going to talk about Lifesum today, but we're also going to talk about investing in the digital health space and what investors should know about the intersection of technology and wellness. I do want to let our viewers know that we're testing out a Q&A service called Slido. We use it at The Fool internally, we think you'll really like it. You can open up Slido in your browser or the app and the code is MFlive. You can submit questions, upvote other people's questions that you want to see us answer. Let's start out with learning about Lifesum. Henrik, could you give us a brief history of how you co-founded this company, what it is, what inspired you to start Lifesum and what stage of growth your company is in today?

Torstensson: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. We got started back in 2013. For us, digital health has been a couple of years and always exploding this year. What we do is that our mission is to improve lives through better eating. We help people eat better and manage their weight, and we have 45 million members. The U.S. is our biggest market, and we help people manage their weight and eat better by providing a digital service in apps for iPhone, Android phones, Amazon (AMZN -2.39%) Halo, and other mass-market digital services.

Cardina: Great. We'll talk a little bit more about Amazon Halo later, a very exciting development there. But for our investors who are familiar with the digital health industry, I'd love to put Lifesum in context with some of the names that we are familiar with. There's traditional weight loss companies like Weight Watchers, and we like to give the takers when we're talking about public companies. I'm just going to put that in the chat. There's Weight Watchers, it used to be people would show up to the clinic. There was definitely an in-person social component. They've certainly pivoted more digitally in recent times, now it's called WW International. Then there are digital-first psychology based weight loss apps, and I think Lifesum falls more on this side of things. The one I'm familiar with was Noom. I'd love to hear what is unique about Lifesum and where does it fit in the digital health, and specifically the weight loss side of things?

Torstensson: What we've built is something that's popular both in Europe and the U.S., which is quite unique, 45 million members, and what we built is a service that allows our users to take a personalized approach to how they eat, so that might be that you want to eat a balanced diet, you want to have a high protein diet, you want to do intermittent fasting. We think that's really key to attract the millennial and Generation Z audiences where we do care No. 1, and so what we've done, we've built a service with great design, a brand that has built a lot of trust and destigmatized actually changing how you literally eat better and healthier. That's one of the things with millennials and Generation Z, it's not the weight watchers of 20 years ago, it's really about eating better, and the drivers of that are many.