Have you ever lusted after a blender? Neither have I, really. But I came close to understanding what that might mean as I perused the website of nutrition and wellness upstart Vejo. It was there that I discovered the company’s “pod-based blender,” the first of its kind.

Initially I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The Vejo blender is reminiscent of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, only softer, rounder and more inviting. Its minimalistic industrial design captivates in sleek matte colors with sensually engineered contours signaling health, vigor, happiness—and perhaps salvation—in one portable, covetable package.

But what is it? In a promotional video, ice crackles across the skin of a perfectly plump blueberry and the fruit crumbles into a powder, which is then concentrated into a slick little pod. The blender opens from a single metallic seam, and the pod clicks into place. A vortex of water and fruit ensues. A woman takes a satisfying sip straight from the blender, which you then realize doubles as a sleek, totally portable cup.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s just a smoothie. We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Yes, but likely never this meticulously researched, this nutritious or this convenient.

To satiate my curiosity, I set up some time to talk with Dr. Lanae Mullane, Vejo’s director of nutrition, via video chat. Mullane immediately strikes me as the perfect spokesperson: glowingly healthy and at ease in her sunlit, plant-filled office. Not a trace of the quarantine blues.

“Vejo’s mission is to create a world that’s healthier and happier,” she tells me. “That may be similar to other people’s mission, but our goal is to do that by making healthy nutrition accessible whenever or wherever you are. We wanted to make sure that just because you don’t have easy access to these fruits and vegetables, you’re not lacking in nutrient-dense, quality foods.”

It’s a lack I’ve felt keenly of late. Between pizza nights and the preservative-laden meals I’ve managed to cobble together from picked-clean grocery store aisles, shelter-in-place has not been my finest dietary hour.

Vejo’s process is designed to maximize nutrients by minimizing the time between picking and packaging. Freeze-drying turns out to be the ideal method, allowing Vejo to use fruits and vegetables at their peak ripeness and nutritional content by freezing them and converting them into a powder, which is placed into pods. This takes mere hours, and the only thing lost in the process is water.

There are numerous Vejo pod varieties, and many are formulated with supplement blends to target specific needs: stress relief, sleep, workout recovery. But no matter what you’re looking for, everything is sourced with seemingly obsessive intention. It’s the only food company I’ve seen with a comprehensive “Never List” dozens of items long. On it you’ll find spooky, multisyllabic chemical compounds alongside familiar suspects such as corn syrup.

But if Vejo were just another smoothie and supplement company, I probably wouldn’t be speaking with Mullane. Her role at Vejo is a good indication of why it stands out in a field crowded with all too often over-promising, overpriced pseudoscientific products.

Mullane’s background in medicine (med school, a naturopathic residency with focus in rheumatology, a primary care practice) makes her a perfect fit for the Vejo team. “I was introduced to Vejo because they wanted to do clinical research, and I love research, so I jumped on board,” she explains. “From there I helped create some guidelines and regulations on what goes into the blends. I helped a lot with the product development so the product would be something that I, as a doctor, would want to recommend to my patients.”

Mullane is also medical director of the recently announced Vejo+ program at the company’s center in Santa Monica. (It has additional locations in Cologne and London.) Vejo+ hints at the bigger ambitions of Vejo as a whole: to make totally personalized nutrition available to everyone.

If you participate in the Vejo+ program, you’ll start with a comprehensive lab workup that includes measurements of more than 160 biomarkers, a detailed body-composition analysis and a qualitative health and nutrition assessment. All that data, along with your specific health goals, goes into the creation of a six-month nutrition and action plan created just for you, with regular check-ins to keep you on track.

Vejo+ members are also offered customized supplement blends. Designed from scratch using your exhaustive health surveys and personal goals, these blends are nothing like the shotgun-style multivitamin approach most of us are familiar with. Recognizing that our bodies and lifestyles are as diverse as our personalities, Vejo supplies you with only what you need—nothing more, nothing less. Athletes are already taking notice, including the boys with Manchester City Football Club and FC Bayern Munich; both teams have their own editions of the Vejo blender, available for purchase.

Of course, we’ve seen what happens when we put our convenience ahead of everything else. Endless landfill-clogging packaging and wasteful delivery come to mind. Can convenience be good for nature? Can we have our organic, polysaccharide-containing, beta-glucan-rich, stress-relieving mushrooms and eat them too? In this case, the answer seems to be yes. Vejo is aware of the problem and is making an effort to reduce waste during every step of the process.

“Thirty to forty percent of the food in the United States is thrown out or wasted,” Mullane says. “Which is incredible, since about one in nine people don’t have enough food to put on their dinner table at night. And part of that food waste is throwing out completely edible, nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables because of the way they look. They don’t meet standards for size, or they don’t have that kind of stereotypical fruit or vegetable look to them. We don’t care what a fruit or a vegetable looks like, as long it’s sustainably grown, organic and nutrient dense.”

Vejo products have a long shelf life, allowing consumers to supplement their fruit and vegetable intake and avoid over-buying fresh products. You no longer have to watch that formerly vibrant head of lettuce deliquesce in the back of your crisper drawer. (Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

Vejo pods are also biodegradable, and soon they’ll be water soluble, allowing you to put a pod in your sink, turn on the tap and watch it melt away into an environmentally harmless goo. And since you add the water to your pods upon arrival, shipping Vejo is much less carbon intensive than shipping drinks, or even fruits and vegetables.

So where does all this leave us? If the future of food looks like delicious organic smoothies enriched with hyper-personalized and sustainable supplements, mixed in smart, sexy, portable blender cups, things could certainly be worse.