Nutrisecure

According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people worldwide are obese, a health crisis that needs to be reversed. In addition, many people get sick from eating street or unsanitary food. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), unsafe food costs 33 million healthy life years each year. This shows that innovative solutions are urgently needed to ensure food safety and help individuals effectively manage their dietary needs, especially in a world where traditional calorie-tracking tools may not meet these complex challenges. The challenge is not counting calories but ensuring that each food item is safe and appropriate for everyone's health. However, the market lacks a comprehensive, accurate nutrition tester that addresses everyone's nutritional needs.

Our innovation heralds a new era in food analysis technology with a compact and portable device that utilises spectroscopy to measure food calories and ingredients accurately. Our innovation enhances food analysis by integrating Confocal Raman spectroscopy and biosensor technology. Confocal Raman spectroscopy operates by analysing the inelastic scattering of photons, which is intimately connected to the vibrational-rotational states of molecules in food. This allows for identifying chemical constituents in food products, including water, which does not interfere with the Raman signals of other constituents. In terms of preventing food poisoning, Additionally, Confocal Raman spectroscopy is invaluable for its rapid, non-destructive detection of contaminants, impurities, or pathogens in food, enhancing our ability to swiftly and accurately pinpoint potential sources of foodborne illnesses. The incorporation of biosensor technology is pivotal in our approach to combating food poisoning. Biosensors enable on-site, real-time testing, surpassing traditional methods in efficiency and effectiveness. They play a crucial role in quickly identifying contaminated food and reducing the risk of widespread outbreaks by enabling prompt responses and product recalls. Rapid pathogen screening at various stages of the food supply chain significantly lowers the chances of food poisoning incidents, thus protecting consumer health and maintaining the integrity of food brands. Our device combines Raman spectroscopy and biosensor technology in a way that works well together. This device combines the precision of biosensors with the molecular analysis capabilities of Raman spectroscopy, drawing inspiration from academic sources such as "Biosensors in Food Processing, Safety, and Quality Control" by Mehmet Mutlu and "Raman, Infrared, and Near-Infrared Chemical Imaging" by Slobodan Sasic. According to the insights offered by "Advanced Sensor and Detection Materials" by Ashutosh Tiwari and Mustafa M. Demir, the merging of these technologies produces a potent tool for improving food safety assessments.

First of all many people have strict standards for food composition, such as calories, protein, sugar, etc., and existing nutrition facts lists and calorie databases are too shallow to personalize each serving. There are also some groups of people with specific allergens. These people often face the challenge of identifying food composition or allergens when consuming products, and most of the time, for a niche allergen, it is difficult for the business to accurately know and label this information on the packaging, resulting in some people are at risk of accidental exposure to allergens. In the current market, people do not have a way to accurately measure the specific composition of the food in front of them. Our Nutrisecure provides people with a simple setting and scanning process to get complete food detection information so that people can better understand the food they are about to consume on an efficient and accurate basis.  

Secondly, some organizations and companies can also benefit from our products. Internet retailers such as Amazon will need a machine to detect food safety problems and go through the scanning process before selling to ensure the safety and allergy of the products sold and protect their reputation. For supermarket deli sections, an accurate calorie measure could help them personalize calorie labels for each plate. For the school canteen, it is necessary to ensure that children are safe from the danger of food poisoning with a machine that quickly detects food safety. However, no product on the market can guarantee personalized, convenient and accurate measurement simultaneously, and our products can solve user problems and challenges.

Our team is focused on solving a problem that is not limited to a single community but everyone who could need it. However, we are more explicitly targeting travellers and fitness enthusiasts. We are a group of international students who travel very often. Because we are unfamiliar with food sanitation and quality in various regions, we sometimes find it hard to trust food sources. One of our team members, Emily, had recently experienced an event of food poisoning because she had ingested food with contaminants; this shows that without a safe method to detect such contaminants, we are simply defenceless against foodborne illnesses. Moreover, we are also interested in helping the fitness community know about their calorie intake in a more efficient and accessible way. The team lead, Thomas, and another team member, Rex, are all passionate about sports and hence our nutrition. We have sought out the pain-points of our peers on the current methods of calorie and nutrition tracking. Through this process we were able to validate the necessity of our product as they had all reflected to us that they would love a product like this. 

So far, we have built a sample program for our product including personalised allergy tracking, clear statistics shown, a tracking history, and user allergy profile requirements. Due to budget limitations, the development of the ideal spectrometer component for the product is currently not feasible.

What specific financial, technical, legal, cultural, or market barriers that you face do you hope Solve can help you overcome, and how? Keep in mind: Solve aims to connect all Solver teams with partners who can help advance their solutions through monetary and/or non-monetary support. If your only goal in applying to Solve is to raise funds, Solve is not the right program for you! Review the Become a Solver page (“What will I get if my solution is selected?”) for more information about what selected Solver teams receive.

We are applying to Solve because we are driven to address the pressing health challenges, particularly in the realm of food safety. Our journey began with a keen interest in an innovative MIT idea: the development of a smartphone-based spectrometer for food sensing. This breakthrough technology holds immense potential to revolutionise food safety practices by enabling swift and portable detection of contaminants and pathogens in food samples. Inspired by this idea, we recognized the opportunity to further enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of food sensing by combining Raman spectrometry with biosensor technology. This novel approach aims to overcome limitations observed in existing methods and provide a more promising solution for ensuring food safety and quality. However, as we embark on this journey, we anticipate encountering several barriers that may impede the progress of our solution. These barriers include financial constraints for research, development, and scale-up of the technology; technical challenges in optimizing the performance and integration of Raman spectrometry and biosensor components; navigating legal and regulatory requirements related to food safety standards and product compliance; addressing cultural perceptions and market acceptance of innovative food safety technologies; and ensuring equitable access to the benefits of our solution across diverse populations and communities. By participating in Solve, we hope to leverage the platform to overcome these barriers and advance our solution with the support of partners who can provide both monetary and non-monetary assistance. We seek collaboration with experts, researchers, industry stakeholders, and regulatory advisors to refine our technology, navigate complex challenges, and accelerate the adoption of our solution in real-world settings. Our goal is not merely to raise funds but to access the resources, expertise, and partnerships needed to make a meaningful impact on food safety and public health.

We plan to implement B2C business model to engage directly with consumers, quickly resolve issues, gather advice, and enhance customer service. Targeting health-conscious individuals with buying power, our company takes a dual online and offline approach, including social media outreach on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, themed exhibitions, and partnerships with influencers like bodybuilder Pamela. As our market share grows, we will also establish B2B business model. Our customers are school canteens, food retail companies, etc., so that they have the ability to use products to test food safety and ingredients before providing services or products to customers to improve food safety.

Because there already are captivating substitutes, we aim to lower the price further than the point of normal profit to attract customers, therefore the first three years of projected profit will be really low. The total cost that we foresee includes raw material, outsourcing, shipping, marketing and app development. Due to a high start up cost. Low output produced relative to the future, our profit earned will be relatively lower than the future. For reference, the profit margin for the first year stands at 23%. After a few years, we are going to bump up the price. Since we’ve already developed a loyal community of consumers, the demand is going to be relatively inelastic, so demand won’t decrease as much. Also, by building an efficient supply chain where we look for opportunities to negotiate better deals with suppliers, explore alternative sourcing options, or consider direct-to-consumer models to eliminate intermediaries, we are able to reduce cost by a significant margin. Also because we expect an exponential growth in demand, we’re going to match the demand with the same amount of supply using the technique of mass production, where we can not only earn more profit from selling more, we can also decrease the cost per unit, therefore increasing the profit per unit and profit margin. This can be shown in year 4 where we foresee a profit margin of 57%. This profit margin does not just benefit our firm, we are going to use this surplus of profit to reinvest into our research and innovation sector for excelling our product further, and sharing our profit with shareholders to encourage more stockholders to invest in our company for further explorations.