Leveraging Data to Incentivize Healthy Eating & Improve Food Safety

The following was my guest post on Food+TechConnect from March 26, 2015.  The post is a bit “far-out”, but meant to be thought provoking and encourage conversation.  

Tackling food issues in the US is not a small feat by any means. With the wealth of knowledge and technology we have today, I began to think about how can we use new technology or design to guarantee healthy, sufficient and safe food for everyone.

To answer that question, I started by exploring new technology tools, incentives and even reimagining the way we produce and regulate food today that could lead to better food for everyone.

It starts with tools to understand and inspire smart consumption and healthy lifestyle and ends with quantified incentives to make change.

In today’s society, sound food education gets overwhelmed and confused by food marketing, fad diets, and general miss-information.  Further, nutrition is not widely understood by a majority of medical professionals. Doctors generally only take 1-2 classes in medical school in nutrition science, yet we turn to them regularly for advice.  The advice is generally reactive and one size fits all. Further, the market for nutrition supplements is unregulated, and the efficacy of many are questionable.

With the advancement in wearables like Jawbone Up and the Apple watch, and personalized nutrition education and planning apps like ShopWell, Fooducate, MyFitnessPal and Yummly, users can both track their general health and activity, learn about foods that are best for their unique diet, and find recipes and meals tailored to their diet.

If you combine these services (which quantify healthy input and output) with an app like Pact, which provides financial incentives for good food and exercise behavior, you can imagine a broader lifestyle tracking system that facilitates healthy food intake and consistent exercise output.  This broader system can connect with an ecosystem of “incentive providers” which can include medical insurance providers, life insurance providers, gyms, food delivery services, and even the government.

By combining education, personalization, and financial incentives together, we can help individuals live healthier more empowered lifestyles. While this may seem far-fetched, this can become a reality in the near future.  More and more consumers are taking tracking their health into their own hands. Sensors are becoming smaller and more useful, products are maturing, and food information companies are collaborating in new and innovative ways.

Link government subsidies and tax incentives to foods associated with healthy lifestyles.

With an active “incentive provider ecosystem” and millions of active users, a wealth of information becomes unlocked about what foods and activities are most associated with healthy changes and outcomes.

Economists and data scientists can mine the large pool of user data to find key drivers of improved health.  Food subsidies, currently going to corn, soy and other less nutrient rich foods, can be more evenly distributed to healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables, to further incentivize producers to grow nutrient rich foods most correlated with quantified healthy consumption and successful health outcomes.

Further, the data for individuals can be used to create “healthy” tax deductions, further reinforcing good behavior.

Food safety is a multi-faceted problem with a multi-faceted solution.

Food safety issues typically arise from the following factors:

1.     Method of production and storage
2.     Temperature and time since production
3.     Unregulated foods and supplements

Method of Production

The first, method of production and storage of food is a challenge.  Food is manufactured behind closed doors.  Imagine, however, we used tools like UStream to broadcast live feeds within food production facilities. To take it a step further we could combine these live feeds with easily read (think geckoboard) dashboards, to allow anyone to view what was happening behind closed doors, and to see the relevant metrics and data about what was being put into their food.  This hyper transparency would both serve to let consumers fully understand how their food is made and it would provide an extra incentive for food manufacturers to produce things that met the standards of the law and consumers.

Temperature & Time

Temperature and time are significant factors for the shelf life of food.  With the advancement in sensor technology, we are reaching a point where fully integrated circuits with temperature sensors and transmitters can be fit into a package sticker.  This will effectively allow us to pinpoint the shelf life of foods.

These portable sticker sensors are already reaching close to viable price points.It is imaginable, within the next years, that these sensors will be cost-effective, communicate wirelessly with other systems, and greatly improve supply chain optimization efforts.  Sell-by and enjoy-by dates will become dynamic, creating less guesswork for the end consumer.

Unregulated Foods and Supplements

With the lifestyle tracking system described before in combination with quantified-self style wearables, users can participate in live trials for supplements on the market. Researchers can mine data to see if there is any connection with the advertised benefits of the product.

A live feed of these results can be connected within store displays, giving consumers up-to-date information about the supplements they are considering.

In closing, while these solutions will not solve these issues overnight or even in the next couple of years, it is safe to say we are already taking steps to make food healthier and safer for everyone in the U.S.

Reimagining Food As a Platform -  My Interview with Karen Webster from PYMNTS.

The following is a repost from a PYMTS post from Feb 4, 2015.  

“What should I make for dinner?”

It is a deceptively simple question.

One that has a variety of answers – all of which are now much easier today, thanks to mobile devices, apps, data and the cloud. For instance, on one end of the spectrum, a consumer can just “make a reservation” and use the OpenTable app to do so, and the Uber app to get them there. Easy peasy.

And if consumers don’t already know the answer, then things get a bit more complicated. Sure, Instacart can bring you groceries and Blue Apron can bring you a meal kit. But Yummly COO Brian Witlin told Karen Webster in a recent podcast interview, that there’s a lot more that could be done.

“There’s a lot of different point solutions out there and more and more every day because companies like Instacart and Blue Apron are raising humongous rounds of funding, with massive valuations,” Witlin observed. “This, naturally, is attracting other players and similar offerings to the space, which is great for the consumer. That said, still managing what you’re going to eat for the week is a challenge because none of these services are really connected.”

And it’s being that connection point that Yummly is striving for, Witlin told Webster, as it pushes towards its modest goal of being the fastest growing food app in the world.

Which as it turns out, isn’t far from the range of possibility for Yummly. The app – which allows users to browse through recipes, set custom user profiles (so the site can make better tailored recommendations) and make recommendations to other digital foodies – was released on iPhone in 2013 and on iPad shortly thereafter in early 2014. It’s remained the top food app on the iPad ever since, and has spent a fair amount of time hovering near the top of food lists on the iPhone.

Yummly, like so many of the startups PYMNTS covers, grew from the pain point its CEO and founder ran across in 2009 – a difficulty using traditional methods online to find decent recipes.

“There were services like Netflix and Pandora that could understand your tastes, but nothing like that for food,” Witlin observed. By 2013 the company saw its audience shifting to mobile and quickly shifted with it to create “a really compelling service on mobile.”

One, as it turns out, appeals to a whole new generation of those with an interest in fine-tuning their cooking skills.

“Millennials are really driving a lot of the demand because this generation of millennials really came about on convenience food,” Witlin observed. “The art of cooking was sort of lost. Not completely, but it became more and more convenient to eat by other means. And so there’s this resurgence in interest in cooking and our app taps into that.”

And Yummly is expanding how it taps into that, with a new partnership with Instacart that will allow Yummly users to instantly order the ingredients they need for what they want to make – and have those delivered to their home by Instacart within the hour.

“We started by building a shopping list,” Witlin told Webster, “and the shopping list was doing fantastic – making it easier for consumers to keep track of what they need to buy at the store to make what strikes their fancy. But with the recent move to ordering groceries online, it made sense to partner with a leader in that space and Instacart, in our minds, is at the head of the pack when it comes to grocery delivery.”

Witlin further noted that, for Yummly, the choice is basically a no-brainer since the pair-up fits in so easily with Yummly’s overall goals.

“Now that Instacart connects to our shopping list, Yummly removes any friction associated with choosing a recipe and making a meal. Consumers hit a button and send their list over to Instacart – they can have their list fulfilled in under an hour.” And, Witlin added, “ it also makes cooking a lot more accessible for people because it’s so convenient.”

For now the service is limited to the 15 major metro areas already served by Instacart, though according to Witlin, they are already seeing scores of users attempting to use the service every day, giving them high hopes for the commerce tie-in’s expansion as the Instacart service itself expands.

“We’re very pleasantly surprised,” Witlin said. “We’re looking forward to seeing those numbers rise.”

The Instacart tie-in is just the first of what Witlin told Webster he hopes will be many for Yummly as the company expands past its original vision.

Going forward, Witlin says, Yummly thinks it can levarage their commerce functions toward lots of inspired actions. That could be ordering a meal kit from Blue Apron or making a dinner reservation or ordering take-out from a restaurant that seems to line up with a user’s taste profile.

“Whether that’s grocery transactions or meal kit transactions, we want people to be able to get inspired and be able to answer the question – ‘What’s for dinner?’” Witlin conjectured that Yummly could become the platform that would enable scenarios that make mealtime simple, easy and seamless, where the app knows enough about consumer preferences to actually know that a consumer orders in on Friday nights and can proactively make recommendations and have delivery set up. “Instead of just plugging into a bunch of disparate services to enable food commerce, we want to be able to make that really seamless to the user where they can have the commerce happening on Yummly and then we handle the referrals to those third parties,” Witlin said.

Today in America, 100 million people will ask themselves the following question: “What do I want to eat tonight?” Yummly thinks the wave of the future will not just be the company that can get it delivered, but a commerce-enabled platform that can almost answer the question before it is even asked.