North Carolina-based INRFOOD aims to add some much-needed context to the food we eat every day by highlighting all the (occasionally funky) ingredients that tend to appear in it. To that end, the bootstrapped startup just launched its iOS and Android app on the TechCrunch Disrupt SF stage and it’s clear that the team wants to bring that age-old adage about watching what you eat into the 21st century.
“There’s so much misinformation when it comes to diet,” founder Keval Mehta told me. “And it all depends on who you listen to.”
The way Mehta (a veteran of two other health-oriented companies) looks at it, people purchasing food pay too much attention to calorie counts and marketing jargon while the most important stuff to take note of — the ingredient list — too often gets ignored. The fact that those ingredients are printed out in a terribly tiny font doesn’t exactly help, and neither does the tendency for those lists to contain things that are nigh-unpronounceable.
That’s where INRFOOD comes in. When a new user fires up the freemium app for the first time they’re prompted to sign up for the service, but there’s a bit of a twist. In addition to creating the usual login credentials, they’re also asked if they adhere to any dietary restrictions because of a medical condition or a lifestyle choice — if a user has a shellfish allergy, a baby on the way, or is a vegan, the app wants to know about it. It’s a purely optional step, but one that dramatically enhances the INRFOOD experience (more on that later).
Anyway, from there, users can punch in names of food products they’re curious about as well as scan UPCs of prepackaged products to bring up a color-coded list of ingredients — green ingredients are safe, yellow ingredients should only be ingested in moderation, and red ones should be avoided. Tapping on any of them brings up a surprisingly comprehensive writeup (thanks to a team of dietitians and nutritionists INRFOOD has worked with) of the ingredient’s origins, uses, and health effects, and users can pop over to the Articles/Videos tab to access pertinent information from multiple external sources in case they need a bit more convincing.
“The only way to be disruptive is to have hard facts,” Mehta explained. “It’s a whole new world when people focus on what those ingredients are capable of doing.”
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