Verdify to scaleup personalised nutrition plans with €1.3m investment
In particular, Verdify plans to expand the brand into the healthcare sector and enable consumers to access nutritional advice from dietitians and medical professionals.
CEO, Jochem Bossenbroek said: “With the new investment, we can not only scale up, but also build a bridge between the healthcare domain and the food sector.”
Recipe suggestions already factor in personal parameters, such as health, food allergies, lifestyle and taste preferences, however proposed partnerships with medical and dietary experts and testing services will enable Verdify to integrate and interpret data from ‘wearables’ and access biomarker tests for nutrigenetics, vitamin levels in the blood and gut microbiota diversity.
Bossenbroek explained: “Such data can provide (near real time) input for the personal nutrition profile. These markers have to be sufficiently validated in medical and/or dietary practice. We implement this via partnerships with companies that provide such testing services.”
With the consent of the user, the relevant data can then be imported into personal nutrition profiles and provide recipes finetuned to the wearable / biomarker measurements.
Commercial endorsements
Verdify is keen to forge closer ties with the food industry and will introduce product endorsements, brand promotions in personalised recipes, and links to digital shopping baskets.
Endorsements will match the Swapmeals.com criteria for healthy and sustainable ingredients, and brand promotions will offer a ‘swap’ alternative for specific ingredients in a recipe.
“The user can choose to swap-in or -out these products. While swapping, the user can see how the nutritional values of the recipe change: for example, to see the amount of salt going up or down,” Bossenbroek explained.
“Most important is that these products can fit in a generally healthy eating style (according to the national nutrition guidelines). We will also implement sustainability criteria.”
Meanwhile, updates to the ordering protocol will provide Swapmeals.com users with a seamless shopping experience.
The new application launches “within the week” and will automatically redirect users to the selected retailer’s checkout when they press the ‘buy online’ link, to complete ingredient purchases.
Bossenbroek says the first link up involves a leading Dutch supermarket, but the application will be available to UK users within two months through a major local retailer. There are also plans for a further, extended roll-out in both countries, he said.
“The pipeline is indeed well filled with other retailers in the Netherlands and the UK, both ‘established’ retailers as well as those that are strongly upcoming.”
Background
Verdify launched Swapmeals.com in 2020 in the UK and The Netherlands thanks to an initial €750,000 (£637,550) capital injection from investors.
The Dutch brand applies technology and nutrition science to help personalise recipes to match lifestyle and dietary needs through the portal.
Personal nutrition profiles are created on the Verdify website and activated on Swapmeals.com to access fully personalised recipes.
The software maps the ingredients in online recipes and tailors them according to users’ nutritional profiles.
A proprietary algorithm replaces unsuitable ingredients with alternatives to match the user profile and creates a new recipe accordingly, without compromising taste or nutritional quality.
Default options can be set, and recipes adapted according to personal parameters such as health, allergies, fitness, lifestyle, location and taste preferences.
The platform is currently only available in the UK and The Netherlands but will soon expand to US and other countries.
“Because of the modular build-up of the recipes, it is relatively easy to make the platform available in other languages as well,” Bossenbroek said.
