What Happened To SmartPlate From Shark Tank Season 7?

On February 12, 2016, the 17th episode of the seventh season of "Shark Tank" aired on ABC. The show opened with a pitch for SmartPlate, a plate armed with scales and cameras to help calculate the nutritional content of various foods served in it. The presentation, though, was hampered by Martin Dell'Arciprete, head of marketing for parent company Fitly, not yet having a working prototype that he could show off to the Sharks. Though the cast appreciated Dell'Aricprete's genuine enthusiasm for helping people make informed decisions about what they eat, the complete lack of even a working prototype was a big red flag for them, made worse by the SmartPlate being over-reliant on outside technology. Dell'Arciprete left the "Tank" without a deal.

Fitly soldiered on though, continuing to operate their existing healthy meal delivery service while also eventually getting SmartPlate to market. The ride had some bumps along the way, though.

When Martin Dell'Arciprete walked onto the "Shark Tank" set, his enthusiasm for SmartPlate carried his pitch. But when he got to the point that he had to show his product off to the Sharks and do a demonstration, the wheels fell off. Daymond John opened by asking how SmartPlate could differentiate between different types of oil, only to learn it couldn't. He followed up by asking how much appeal the plate could have while only being for home use, to which Dell'Arciprete explained that's where the camera-based smartphone app came in. This raised additional questions: If the app was up to snuff, why wasn't that the product instead of the $199 SmartPlate? Barbara Corcoran asking for a demonstration, only to learn that the prototypes were not yet functional, which just exacerbated the Sharks' concerns.

Daymond found the entire pitch "uncomfortable" and pulled out, with Kevin O'Leary quickly following him because it was primarily an at-home product. Mark Cuban then pulled out because there was no functional product yet and Fitly was contracting the technical work out to a third-party industrial design firm, while guest Shark Chris Sacca opted out because he felt that prioritizing the plate was a mistake. And Barbara was out because she felt that Dell'Arciprete, while very genuine, simply had a bad pitch.

The Sharks were negative enough on the pitch that the initial asking price, $1 million for 15% (a $6.66 million valuation) never really came into the equation.

SmartPlate's "Shark Tank" segment was shot in late September 2015, about four-and-a-half months before it aired, but the segment caused issues at Fitly almost immediately after it was shot. A few days after the episode aired, Philly Mag confirmed that Martin Dell'Arciprete had been laid off by Fitly shortly after filming. Asked if he was fired over the failed pitch, Dell'Arciprete said "That would be my interpretation," but Fitly CEO Anthony Ortiz responded by saying that the move was due to  "other performance issues" which he refused to specify.

"To be fair to Martin, I think he did a stellar job," Ortiz added. "He was prepared and I think he did his best," said Ortiz. "I think the Sharks missed the mark and didn't ask deep enough questions." Dell'Arciprete, meanwhile, was frustrated because he felt that he did as well as he could given the state of the product at the time. "I pitched and represented the product to [the] best of my ability given the state it was in," he said. "I saw the Sharks' responses on the company's valuation and the fact that it was a prototype — and those were things I red-flagged in my discussions with the CEO."

(Philly Mag's Jared Shelly made sure to note, though, that the "Shark Tank" producers knew where the product was at because they reached out after Fitly raised $110,872 in a Kickstarter campaign for Smartplate.)

Fitly seemed concerned enough about how the episode came off to issue a press release rebutting the Sharks' key points. But if you believe Ortiz, he was already ahead of the game, with claiming that Fitly had distribution with Target, Amazon, Jet.com, and Bed Bath & Beyond for SmartPlate.

On the surface, if you go to the SmartPlate website as of August 2023, it presents as a functional storefront for you to order the $199 plate/tray package plus the required $30 per month subscription to go along with it. However, that falls apart under scrutiny. Fitly's nutritional counseling services are offered on the home page first, but clicking on the "Apply Now" button brings you to a broken website about lead generation, and not paying for nutritional counseling. Scrolling down that main page and clicking "Get SmartPlate now" takes you to a functional web page that outlines what you get with your purchase and subscription. However, clicking "Join Now!" on that page sends you to a URL that while it must have been a functional storefront in the past,  now raises security alerts from both Google Chrome and the McAfee product that Verizon Fios uses to protect its customers.

The SmartPlate listing on Amazon didn't go up until January 2022, has the product listed as "currently unavailable," and has no historical pricing information available on CamelCamelCamel.com. The listing for the SmartPlate iOS app is still functional on Apple's App Store, and though that looks promising on the surface, with an average 4.1-star rating out of five, there are just 68 ratings in the pool and only 10 of them have written reviews. Those reviews start glowingly in 2021, with all seven from that year being five stars, but then the two from 2022 both scored it three stars, with one finding the app problematically glitchy. The lone 2023 review, from February, gives the app the lowest possible rating, one star because the app wouldn't connect to the plate and customer service wouldn't respond to the reviewer's inquiries. In addition, clicking the links for the app's FAQ page and privacy policy both result in "page not found" errors.

As for the Android app, it exists and is available on various APK archive websites, but it's no longer on Google Play. As for the last, most old-school check, calling the phone number on the SmartPlate website? It goes directly to a voicemail box that has no identifying information about the company.

Fitly founder and CEO Anthony Ortiz's remaining web presence is, at best, confusing. His LinkedIn page says he now resides in San Juan, Puerto Rico instead of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and also added a new role in April 2023: Founder and CEO of Fitly Health, a company somehow distinct from Fitly. On Twitter, he was active as recently as July 18, 2023, although "active" is a stretch. His main goal now is pushing Fitly NFTs, which he and/or newly credited co-founder Brandon Diggs stumped for in a Medium post on his Fitly Health account. They apparently have something to do with selling your health information to data brokers. Even though that post is from July 12, 2023, it still pushes SmartPlate as Fitly's "flagship product" despite the only place to buy one being a completely broken website.

Or is it?

The Medium post and a companion YouTube video both link to a Fitly page on the NFT platform Uniqly.io, where you can buy NFTs redeemable for SmartPlates. Which leaves us with a number of unanswered questions. Why Fitly has moved to this decidedly bizarre way of taking orders? Why are the orders limited to just 25 standalone SmartPlates or 50 plates bundled with a year of service? Why has the company's primary web presence been allowed to rot? Why do the Fitly social media pages still direct interested parties to the broken website before all else?

So is Anthony Ortiz still using Fitly to sell SmartPlates and subscriptions? Or is he switching to NFTs as a creative way to unload his remaining stock? As of this writing, there are no clear answers.