More than 78, 000 people have signed a petition online calling on WW, formerly Weight Watchers, to remove its new app aimed at children ages 8 to 17.
The app, called Kurbo by WW, is designed to help kids and teens ... reach a healthier weight, according to a statement released by WW.
The app uses the Traffic Light System, which divides foods into red, yellow and green groups. It also steers children toward eating more green light foods like fruits and vegetables.
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The free app, which offers 1:1 coaching for a fee, also lets kids track their food and their behaviors around food. Further, it gives them access to recipe videos and healthy eating, and living-focused games, according to WW.
The app has drawn criticism from some parents and nutritionists who fear the app is too geared to weight loss and could hurt kids' relationship with food.
The story that you are hearing over and over again is all of us who started struggling at the age that this app is targeted for saying it was already bad enough without an app, said Holly Stallcup, the woman who started the Change.org petition and who says she is in recovery from an eating disorder. If we had had this app in our hands to literally log every bite of food to eat, we know that some of us would have actually died from our diseases because it would have so enabled our unhealthy, mentally ill thinking.
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At least 30 million people in the U.S., of all ages and genders, suffer from an eating disorder, according to statistics compiled by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), a non-profit organization that supports people with eating disorders.
One part of the criticism leveled against Kurbo by WW is that it includes success stories that feature before and after photos of children as young as 8 years old, how much weight they have lost and their testimonials.
Looking at before and after pictures of kids who have lost weight is absolutely something that could lead to children to feel horrible about themselves and it really is a form of body shaming, Keri Glassman, a New York City-based registered dietitian.
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They could have created an app for children that promoted healthy eating and healthy lifestyle and good health education and information and help children boost confidence, she said. But I feel like the way this app was built is so similar to Weight Watchers, and just geared completely towards weight loss, weight loss, weight loss.
Childhood obesity is described by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a serious problem for American children. The CDC estimates obesity affects around 13.7 million children and adolescents, ages 2 to 19, in the U.S.
WW says it acquired Kurbo last year and then conducted qualitative research to inform product development that would improve the user experience and make the prior Kurbo program more holistic.
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The exterior of a Weight Watchers meeting room and store location is pictured in Staten Island, New York on June 28, 2016, in New York City.
According to recent reports from the World Health Organization, childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century. This is a global public health crisis that needs to be addressed at scale, Joanna Strober, co-founder of Kurbo, said in a statement released by WW. As a mom whose son struggled with his weight at a young age, I can personally attest to the importance and significance of having a solution like Kurbo by WW, which is inherently designed to be simple, fun and effective.
In addition to the free content, Kurbo by WW's subscription-based content includes services like one-on-one 15-minute virtual video sessions with specially-trained, Kurbo certified coaches and content for parents like recipes, shopping lists and a newsletter.The company is dropping the “Weight Watchers” name that has been part of popular culture for 65 years to become known as “WW.” The change, effective Monday, marks the latest move by the company to retool itself as a wellness organization that goes beyond weight loss.
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WW has enjoyed a renaissance since media mogul Oprah Winfrey became a major investor and director in 2015. The company wants to leverage its expertise in nutrition to follow the recent consumer shift in which people are focused on their overall health and lifestyle, not just their weight.
The new identity sets the stage for WW to sell more services and products to its membership, which numbers 4.5 million people—1 million more than a year earlier, though slightly below the record number earlier this year. That total figure includes 1.6 million people who attend its meetings, as of last quarter. (The company is seeing especially fast growth coming from online subscribers.)
Dropping its well-known Weigh Watchers name presents some risk for the company, though it has telegraphed its intentions for several years by using a WW logo in its mobile app and for its WW Freestyle weight-loss program launched late last year, which adds many so-called zero-point foods, points being a proxy to calories. The WW brand also nods to the company’s new tagline, “Wellness that works.”
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That the branding and strategy change was necessary to keep the company primed to win more of the booming health and wellness market and positioned to hit its target, announced in February, of hitting $2 billion in revenue by 2020, up from $1.3 billion last year.
“We will never abdicate our authority and our position as the best healthy, sustainable weight loss program on the planet, ” Grossman says in an interview ahead of her appearance Monday evening at ’s inaugural Brainstorm Reinvent conference in Chicago. “But we can be so much more to people.”
The executive is right not to downplay the continued importance of weight management to WW’s business. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 39.8% of American adults were obese in 2016, up from 30.5% at the turn of the century. But Grossman sees the changes as a launching pad to expand WW’s businesses.
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Beyond the new name and logo—two Ws, one on top of the other, vaguely recall Volkswagen’s famous emblem—WW is in the process of shaking up its food and related products so that come January, none of them have any artificial sweeteners, flavors, colors or preservatives.
That’s no small matter: Products with those ingredients represent 70% of its sales in a category that includes products like bars, snacks, and cookbooks and generated 13% of WW’s sales last fiscal year. The company believes the category could grow dramatically. The bulk of WW’s revenue – 80%- comes from membership subscriptions, which start at $3.99 a week and extend to personal coaching plans, which begin at $12.69 per week.
WW is also launching “Connect Groups” in its mobile app to cater to specific subsets of its members. For example, people who want to eat gluten-free food can swap tips with like-minded members. It’s very much a modern version of the socializing that has been central to Weight Watchers business model for decades, since its founding in 1963 by Queens, N.Y. homemaker Jean Nidetch, who had the insight that endeavors like weight loss are easier with like-minded people who can share tips and provide support so you don’t cheat.
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Indeed, technology has played a big part in WW’s efforts to reinvent itself. The company is beta-testing the integration of its services with Amazon‘s Alexa personal assistant and Google‘s Assistant to let a member, say, verbally ask how many points a given food count for, or track what they eat. It’s also adjusting its signature point system, which assigns points to individual items, so a person can use WW’s mobile app to budget their caloric intake based on his or her height, weight, age, sex, and activity.
“If we’re really going to be about holistic wellness, we have to provide people with the tools for all parts of wellness, ” Grossman says. “That means what they put in their body, how they move their body, how they think, what’s going to make them feel accountable to themselves.”
Getting to $2 billion in sales by 2020, which means 15% growth per year, might seem a tad ambitious. In reality, it’s where WW should have been by now: Revenue peaked at $1.84 billion six years ago and fell all the way to $1.16 billion in 2014 before starting to rebound.
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It was a stunning decline, given the company’s reputation for effectiveness, not to mention the ongoing obesity epidemic. But more Americans were eschewing subscriptions to services that assigned points to different foods in a bid for them to gauge overall leanness and healthfulness.
Instead, consumers were opting to download any of a multitude of free fitness apps, many of which linked their diet to their exercise regimen. Suddenly, WW found itself competing with not only the likes of Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem but Fitbit, Apple, Nike, and Strava, among many others.
Enter Winfrey and her megawatt stardom. Not only did she help WW focus its digital strategy but she gave it a boost in the analog
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