Nucona

America is facing the largest health crisis of its lifetime -- the obesity epidemic, which is currently affecting over 40% of the population and costing the country trillions of dollars of extra spending due to chronic disease.

Much of obesity is driven by lifestyle factors, such as bad diet. However, the solutions that exist in the market today require excessive money or effort from the participants, making the programs a privilege of the few. 

Using the national dietary guidelines, behavioral nudges and AI, we have built a real time nutritional guidance and cashback rewards solution for American shoppers, which integrates seamlessly into their everyday behavior and fosters better habits. 

The product works as a browser extension and recommends better-for-you substitutions, together with rewards, directly as people shop, all in real time. You can think of it as Rakuten or Honey for health. 

In store, shoppers can leverage push notifications to guide them to the aisles  that complement their diet, like walking around with a dietician in their pocket. 

Many solutions exist on the market today that address nutritional needs of the US population. However, almost all of them require a combination of high effort activities, such as calorie counting and meal logging, expensive treatments, meals and time consuming calls with dietitians. Because the lower income American people tend to have less spare time and money, such solutions for them are often inaccessible. It is exactly those types of populations that we are after, and they tend to be distributed in the following geographic zones with high obesity: 

Our low effort solution, which seamlessly integrates with existing lifestyle factors and needs, offers money back rather than taking money from the participants, which opens it up to a much wider audience and makes the solution sustainable for all, not only the already well off.   

I am a software entrepreneur residing in Silicon Valley, where I have access to the best and latest technology that the market can offer in terms of user experience and design. My cofounder is a dietitian residing in Louisiana, the state with the highest obesity in the country according to the CDC, where she goes around communities, offering them our product free of charge. 

We have launched the product and have 38 active users. We have demonstrated the product to the key government organizations responsible for public health in America -- The CDC, USDA, HHS and FDA -- and have been chosen to participate in the White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities. Yet, we are still not in the growth stage, where we have figured out all the product details and are acquiring users fast, and this is where we can use some help.  

We are all working toward a better world. But neither of us can accomplish our individual goals alone, and this is why the MIT Solve community matters so deeply to each of us. Sure, we have a decent product out, and even the funding to continue and fulfill our White House Pledge (see American Foundation for Nutrition Consumption Advancement). But we don't consider ourselves done until we can reach many more people across the country, especially in the at-risk zones. Building partnerships within the healthcare provider community or employers who are part of MIT Solve would help us deliver the product to those important areas. 

Nutritional guidance is a fraught subject in the United States because we've been wrong so much in the past. Even today, you may hear diametrically opposite claims about nutrition coming at you at the same time. It is no surprise then that 62% of consumers cite conflicting information and confusion about the healthfulness of specific foods according to Deloitte. A variety of existing solutions, educating consumers on the healthfulness of the foods they eat, have focused on meal logging, meal ordering, individual work with dieticians, surveys and lessons. These solutions are not befitting of someone who is strapped for time and money or is worried about making ends meet. In other words, these solutions are not befitting of the most vulnerable of the American people. And this is why obesity keeps rising in the country. 

To deliver nutritional guidance to the less advantaged, time and money sensitive American consumers, we need a radically different approach -- one that makes the services easy to access, seamlessly integrated into one's lifestyle and also rewarding in the near-term (think cash back). Nucona offers such as solution through innovative real time browser and push notification technology, which works directly as people shop for food inside the same apps. But we also don't stop there, we are committing our own money as rewards for people to make better food choices. We do this because we know that when people around us are better off, we will all be better off. 

But we don't want to stop there either, we want this action to spread to the broader healthcare sector, especially the insurance sector, where gains in a healthier population would reflect in lower operating costs for the companies. This is where we need your help! The community that you are building around the healthcare sector is where better health can start. 

A key pillar of our product is financial incentives, which drive people to make better food choices as they shop for groceries in real time. But we are not the first ones to leverage this concept. In fact, the American CDC currently sees nutrition incentives as a priority health strategy for the country with a proven outcome of improving public wellbeing. Part of that conviction is driven by years of research by the Tufts Institute - the most respected nutrition research center in the United States. Their studies have demonstrated that incentives may cut down healthcare costs in the order of tens of billions and prevent close to a million cardiovascular events if the national incentives were maintained at the current levels. 

We don't seek to change those programs, we seek to strengthen them with better technology. Instead of only incentivizing fruit and vegetable consumption, we seek to educate and incentivize consumers on every type of food. Instead of integrating reimbursements with select stores only, we seek to integrate with all stores at no extra cost. Instead of relying on consumer reports to monitor change, we monitor shopping and diet automatically through our app. And finally, instead of subsidizing produce at a 50% discount, we are aiming to spend only 1-2% of the product value. All this makes our programs more sustainable. 

But this is not the full theory of change. The rest of the story lies with the consumer. It takes on average 66 days to form a habit. With an affordable program, such as ours, we should be able to support anyone in the country for this long with our guidance and rewards. What's more, because their health will improve as a result, the savings from lower medical bills will pay for the program in order of 1.5% cash back for every percentage point of improvement. That is, if someone improves 5 points on the national HEI scale (or 5%), the program is paid for in the order of 7.5% cash back. In other words, it pays for itself. 

Our mission is very simple: improve the US population by 1 point on the HEI scale by 2030. This change alone will translate into $28B annual savings for the country as a whole and prevent close to one million deaths, as extrapolated from this research. 

Tracking progress is ingrained into the product itself. Because the system works in real-time, all shopping behavior is recorded and translated into the HEI dietary output, making reporting fully automatic. See the illustration below:

The solution exists in two parts: the browser extension tracks what people are buying online and inserts guidance directly into the webpage (see the screenshots above). Outside the browser, people can scan items and receive push notifications that correspond to their diet and guide them to the right aisles inside the store. 

The unique contribution of Nucona is how we convert individual products into the HEI dietary scores, as well as recommendations, which comply with people's shopping behavior and offer incremental guidance using AI. Last part of the secret sauce is excellent design and user-first product principles. In other words, for us, the product is not good enough until it is easy to use, easy to access and helpful. 

Full time: Ilya - CEO and Dana - Head of Nutrition and Product

Part time: Dennis - Marketing, Gemma - Design, Anton - Back End Engineering, Vitalii - Front End Engineering, Andrzeij - Mobile Engineering

I have been trying out different solutions since 2019, when I ran several pilots without incentive. I began to focus on incentives exclusively in 2022 and in 2023 began building the first app. 

Our offices are remote and distributed around the world. Some of our crew are refugees from the war in Ukraine, enjoying livelihood and stability through their work with us at a very crucial moment in their lives. 

The business is split into two parts: non-profit (Nucona) and for-profit (Aresystems). Nucona's mission is simply to improve health in America. For this, we are targeting mostly at-risk populations in high obesity zones across the US, such as where the Cofounder and Head of Product is based. The objective there is to lower the healthcare costs for the country, as I described in the previous section.

For the for-profit side, the idea is to charge insurance companies and/or employers for lowering their healthcare costs. Studies by the CDC show that programs such as ours can reduce such costs by 25%, which would be roughly $2000 per employee per year on average across the country. Our program could cost under $200 all-in per employee per year, which is a 900% ROI. We will be able to achieve such incredible savings and ROI due to maximally leveraging technology in nutritional guidance, a novel feat for a nutrition company. 

So far our activities have been sponsored by charitable donations. For the nonprofit arm, it may stay this way. For the for-profit operation, talks with employers and employer benefit brokers are ongoing. We may be financially solvent as soon as next year, if the talks go favorably. Our threshold for solvency is around 10,000 end users at the starter rate that we are planning to charge. MIT Solve could be critical in helping us get to that 10,000 number through catalyzing more conversations, as well as offering your validation and idea backing.