NutriBees: a taste for designing your own custom-made healthy food (part III)

2017-07-05 The two business partners, both born in 1989, sharing a common goal: supplying good, healthy food prepared on the basis of customers’ specific requirements with all the skill of a chef and the advice of a nutritionist, delivered right to customers’ doors. Giovanni Menozzi and Mario Villani met at Università Bocconi and joined forces to found the start-up NutriBees.
The service has only been on-line for a few weeks, and can currently support only a few subscriptions, to test the business model and further develop it, but they have great plans for the future: helping people eat what is good for them.
Giovanni, NutriBees offers what science says is good for us.
“Yes, the menus planned in collaboration with biologist and nutritionist Anna Villarini, who spent a lot of time analysing the relationship between illness and diet, are based on the latest guidelines of the World Health Organisation and consist of complete, balanced dishes: they always include whole grains, “good” protein (fish, legumes or white meat) and cooked vegetables in season. Customers should then add fresh fruit and vegetables and water. They can select a vegetarian or vegan menu and specify dietary intolerances and allergies, but they cannot ask for cured meats, red meat or dairy products, which we do not offer. We also use spices that have been demonstrated to have an anti-inflammatory effect, such as turmeric. The menu changes every week, and portions are calibrated to suit customers’ needs.”
What is your principal goal?
“In the long term, we would like to improve the depth and degree of detail of the information we collect on customers’ lifestyles (for example, sports and medical examinations recorded in a special app), creating an algorithm that suggests a weekly meal plan in real time, which can they be purchased (entirely or in part) via the NutriBees platform.”
Do you have other goals?
“Another goal is to increase the number of recipes we offer. For now we only offer lunch and dinner, but we will soon be offering breakfasts and a special section dedicated exclusively to our snacks, offering a healthy alternative to the classic junk food snacks sold in vending machines. Now, alongside the flow from the website, we also have a snack area offering healthy snacks, but we don’t make them ourselves. Another goal for the future is to move in the direction of organic foods: at the moment, only a few of the foods we offer, such as eggs, are organic, but not the whole menu: we did this to keep the price of our meals down to 10 to 12 euros each, a price which goes down depending on the number of weeks the customer subscribes for, seeing as we need to make a name for ourselves.”
What do you think the diet of the future will be like?
“I imagine it as highly customised: food will increasingly be customised to suit each person’s lifestyle and needs. Treatments that are currently done with pharmaceuticals can be done with food, offering something tasty and healthy that helps prevent and even cure a number of pathologies. Food is increasingly being used as a drug. This is why we believe there is a market for a service like ours.”

Mariagrazia Villa