Building a better beverage

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This article was published 15/06/2018 (2849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hospital stays are rarely pleasant but one local entrepreneur is looking to make the experience a bit easier to stomach.

Erin Goldberg is part of the development team behind a new meal replacement drink called Thrive.

The vegan beverage was created by Goldberg’s company ViTal Functional Foods, which was co-founded with nutritionist Lisa Reed and dietitian Sara Raposo-Blouw.

Goldberg, a post-doctoral fellow at the St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre working in the field of sensory sciences, recently collected a $40,000 social entrepreneur award from Mitacs — a
Canadian non-profit research and training organization — for the trio’s work on Thrive.

According to Goldberg, who lives in Tuxedo, the meal replacement beverages currently used in hospital and care home settings have a number of deficiencies. They tend to be loaded with refined sugar, are extremely processed, and often use animal-based ingredients, Goldberg said. The biggest issue, however, is the product just doesn’t taste good, leading to a lot of waste. Some clients can be ordered to consume the drinks three to four times a day, Goldberg said, not an easy task for those dealing with nausea and lack of appetite.

Thrive, on the other hand, is enjoyable to drink, the 29-year-old said. The formula goes down smooth, is low in sugar and high in fibre, and with her expertise in nutrition and sensory science, successfully masks the bitter flavours that characterize plant-based drinks.

“It’s really difficult to consume that much of something that doesn’t taste very good,” she said.

“We wanted to create a healthier product, minimize the number of ingredients, but also the number of heavily processed ingredients.”

When she was a child, Goldberg learned first hand about why people often complain about food served in institutions. At five years old Goldberg was diagnosed with stage four rhabdomyosarcoma cancer which metastasized to her bone marrow. She spent 139 days in hospital over two years and went through a regime of chemotherapy and felt the side effects.

Today Goldberg is healthy but still recalls not being able to enjoy consuming food while receiving treatment and wants others going through similar circumstances to have better options on their plates.

“So when people are already in that state, whether they have a current illness or they’re an older adult just struggling to eat solid food, just to add a little bit more enjoyment to their life while they’re recovering is basically our goal,” Goldberg said.

ViTal Functional Foods, which was incorporated in 2016, is currently looking for investors to get the chocolate mocha and vanilla blueberry prototypes to the next stage. Goldberg says they need about $100,000 to run benchtop trials and scale up the formula. Once capital is in place, she said it will be another six months before they’ll be able to provide samples to hospitals and nursing homes. The financial award from Mitacs is a solid start, Goldberg said, along with the exposure from the event.

“We’re extremely excited to get our name out there and to have everything that we’ve been working on out there and people know what we’re doing,” she said. “The interest has been amazing.”