Why We Invested in Bento: Addressing the Silent Crisis of Food Insecurity with Dignity

By Kristi Ebong, HealthX Partner

Photo source: Bento

When it comes to food insecurity, it’s not often the first issue that comes to mind for a venture-backed startup. However, with Bento’s co-founders, Mick Ebeling and Adam Dole, we saw a beautiful pairing: a duo who sought to tackle problems others deemed impossible. Their approach was all about putting people first—they didn’t just apply business principles; they focused on how to reach, engage, and build trust with people facing serious challenges. The joining of forces between a consumer tech founder and an enterprise healthcare founder resulted in a breakthrough that is not only changing lives, but potentially saving them. 

Bento isn’t giving handouts: they’re serving the 50 million Americans who are food insecure, usually working multiple jobs and facing tough choices in making ends meet: regular decisions in whether to pay for rent or buy groceries. Mick and Adam sought to understand the unique challenges that food insecure people face and provide a way to solve their greatest needs, designing a technology-based solution to connect with them in a confidential, trustworthy, and most importantly—dignified way. With a simple text message, individuals can order healthy food and when those groceries show up, the person who picks it up at the grocery store and delivers it to them has no idea that the recipient is food insecure. This is both revolutionary and yet so simple at the same time. Hard-working people are no longer relegated to the sugary, unhealthy food they would resort to buying from the local dollar store: they’re able to obtain healthy, nutritious, culturally-relevant foods from their local supermarket.

At HealthX Ventures, we believe incredible opportunities exist at the intersection of consumer-first technology and traditional enterprise healthcare. Co-Founders Mick Ebeling and Adam Dole embodied this from the outset. Instead of asking, “Who in enterprise healthcare do we need to sell to?” They began with a fundamental question: “How do we truly understand what people facing food insecurity need most, and how can we solve that?” By approaching the problem with a person-centered methodology, the Bento team was able to find business model alignment and marry their offering up with existing  funding streams lacking effective solutions in the market.

The Scalability of Bento’s Food as Medicine Model

People don’t identify as patients; they identify as people. One thing everyone has in common worldwide is that food is foundational to good health—everyone loves food, especially good food. Food is how we communicate, how we comfort, and how we cure. If our society, especially for the most disadvantaged among us, makes it hard to access healthy food, everything else becomes secondary. Food is a basic need, yet in the U.S., it sometimes feels like a privilege. Ebeling and Dole set out to turn this on its head.

From the investor’s perspective, this is where early-stage company building is distinct and requires a principled vision alongside a vested interest in helping our teams grow into that vision. With Bento, HealthX saw an incredible founding team that had conviction in their principles and blew us away with the principled approach they took to seeing people with dignity.  We believe it is our job to align their vision with operating chops and support in executing an enterprise business model positioned for scale.

We are laser-focused on scaling Bento to create a country in which all food-insecure Americans have access to healthy, nutritious food in a dignified and trusted way. Longer term, we see a world in which these solutions benefit not just underserved communities, but also the hundreds of millions of Americans with more flexible income who also face daunting nutritional and access challenges when it comes to consuming quality and cost-effective food, which remains the foundation of good health.

Impacting Healthcare Payers and Cost Savings

Health insurance companies—payors—historically have some of the lowest NPS scores in the industry or even the world, while Bento has nailed some of the highest NPS scores in consumer engagement. This is a win-win, made possible through true partnership. Payors will never be consumer tech companies first; at their core they are health insurance companies. By partnering with a team that genuinely understands how to build trust and engage with people in their most vulnerable moments creates unprecedented opportunity. Nutrition services are often reimbursable by health plans, but they’re often underutilized and difficult to access: this is where the magic of Bento marries up with the imperatives of the health plan’s member needs. Simply put, nutrient-dense groceries cost much less for health insurance companies than preventable hospitalizations. 

Technology that Taps into Core Humanity

Bento began with SMS text technology because all people—even the lowest income—have access to it. The art of the Bento solution lies in the infrastructure and design behind the tech stack that Bento has achieved through partnerships and an intentional and award-winning product design. The marriage is part tech stack and part consumer support infrastructure, wrapped in a delightful and easy to use package. Bento is most unique in how the team understands and tracks how the Bento experience and dollars flow through the business, allowing the company to not only be sustainable, but to thrive.

At the end of the day, underlying our basic needs is a general sense of health and well-being. Our bodies are literally made up of the food we consume, therefore it makes sense that solving the access and equity equation requires unique ingredients such as trust, dignity, quality, and nutrient-density! Wrapping a scalable, frictionless business model around this is an incredible privilege, and with great privilege comes great responsibility. Our vision includes scaling the service to all Americans, regardless of plan, and we fundamentally believe in Bento’s sustainable model that changes American health one meal at a time.

A Hybrid Business Model That Works

We wouldn't be able to offer the dignified provision of healthy food in this capacity if we hadn't first intimately understood the needs of the communities we serve. It’s only through the radical consumer-first principles embedded in this platform that we can derive such extraordinary value for the enterprises that pay for it. When it comes to serving any vulnerable population—whether socioeconomically disadvantaged or medically underserved—we believe that it begins through building trust within communities, with Bento at the top of the list.

Our investment in Bento is driven by a shared mission to combat food insecurity alongside the belief that access to good food is a human right. Through HealthX’s partnership with Bento, we aim to create a sustainable impact in healthcare while restoring dignity and well-being to those most in need.

Learn more about Bento at gobento.com. Don’t miss the latest updates about the HealthX portfolio—sign up for our monthly newsletter!