KOCHI: Founded in December 2017, it didn’t take long for Tweak & Eat to make its presence felt. In just over a year, the startup has its footprint in seven countries and has over 7,00,000 app downloads. The reason being, its utility value and the public’s need to start watching their health and diet. Co-founded by Narayanan Ram and Anand Subra, Tweak & Eat is an AI-powered wellness app for weight management that analyses the nutritive content of a meal and makes real-time portion control and other meal-modification suggestions at the point of consumption.
Anand Subra says, “We are always looking for new ways to improve people’s lives and periodically meeting in some location to brainstorm new ideas. During one such meeting in 2015, we were discussing the obesity and overweight epidemic and looking at various sites and apps that were addressing the fitness/wellness space.
We wanted to make a difference to people with weight-related health issues.” He adds, “We thought about this, and it seemed to us that while it is one thing to ‘know’ that curtailing carb intake leads to weight-loss, it is totally another thing to take the appropriate actions when sitting at a meal filled with all sorts of carb-temptations! What would really help was hand-holding them: telling them which items to avoid and which to eat, and how much. This would make things far easier.” Doing what one would have to hire a nutritionist and a diet expert, the app was an instant hit.
This is how it works. Tweak & Eat enables subscribers to get meal-modification advice (‘tweak’) from a nutritionist just before eating a meal. Subscribers simply snap a picture of the meal they are about to eat and upload it via the app. Nutritionists view the picture and suggest portion adjustments, swaps, eating sequence, etc., based on its nutritional content and recent meal history, as well as subscriber physical parameters, diet restrictions, allergies and wellness goals.
Subscribers also get personalized advice, coaching and recommendations for future meals, and they can chat with nutritionists and get clarifications. The company was bootstrapped with the founders own investment. However Anand says, “We will seek funding to expand from here given the rapid growth in user base and user engagement.” Anand has big plans lined up for the future.
He shares, “Our future plans are to disrupt and transform the Wellness App space by connecting subscribers to our nutritionists in real-time for personalized meal advice ‘just before eating’ to help them properly modify their current meals in order to achieve their individual health goals. By the end of 2020, we will register 15 million subscribers from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and USA. We will establish an extensive database of multi-ethnic food images, nutritional data and individual preferences. We will deftly exploit Artificial Intelligence technologies to scale-up to billions of tweaks.”