Josh Hix - CEO and Founder, Season Healthcare Reimagined

In 2019, we lost more than 14,000 Americans to firearm homicide and more than 36,000 to car accidents. As a point of comparison, every year, diet contributes to approximately 678,000 deaths in the U.S., due to nutrition- and obesity-related diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In the last 30 years, obesity rates have doubled in adults, tripled in children, and quadrupled in adolescents. While of course some of these conditions have genetic components, there is no question that the food we eat (and are marketed) has played a role. 
I spoke with Josh Hix, CEO and founder of Season, to learn more about how he and his team are using food as medicine.  Josh previously started and sold a company called Plated, a meal-kit delivery service that was bought in 2019.  It turned out that while people had signed up for Plated to explore new cuisines, to do something new with their spouses, and a host of other reasons unrelated to diet, they ended up with better health outcomes 6 months later. Most people did not start because they wanted to get healthier, which was an important learning for Josh. 
When a National payer contacted Josh a few years after he'd started the company to tell him that consumers had told them they'd seen dramatic improvements in their health outcomes as a result of using his service, it planted a seed that Josh has only now had the chance to explore as he's built a company that uses food as medicine. While it has been known for some time that food has a huge impact on health, the status quo of pre-prepared meals doesn't work for everyone.
While a prepared meal is helpful for a patient who isn't ambulatory and can't cook, it has to be delivered in a consumable way. For some, a generic prepared meal is great. For others, let's say a newly diagnosed diabetic, being told to lower sodium intake when working two jobs and cooking for a family of four of picky eaters is not actionable, nor is being sent home with food that will not meet the needs of the whole family.  What is missing is an emphasis on personalized prescriptions for patients on which the patient is able to take action. This is what Season does remarkably well. So how did we get here?
The chronic disease burden we have today is not even close to what it was 100 years ago. According to Tufts, 85% of Healthcare spend is related to food, meaning 16% of our GDP. While we have more processed foods in the market today than at any point in history, the only thing that Josh expressed with certainty was that when we use food as medicine, and put more nutritionally dense food into patients diets, we can manage if not reverse chronic disease. And that is exactly what he has set out to do. 
Season recently announced partnerships with Geisinger, CommonSpirit, and Cricket, and and $8 million round let by LRV Health, Bain Capital, 8VC, HealthyVC, and angels including Max Mullen, founder of Instacart, and Toyin Ajayi, Co-founder and CMO Cityblock health.

To learn more about Season, you can check out their website.