Entrepreneurship wasn’t just a career choice for Soniya Ashar; it was a legacy inherited from her father, whose business thrived in Dubai for over four decades. This lineage of entrepreneurial spirit set the foundation for Ashar’s journey, culminating in the creation of NutriCal, the region’s pioneering food intelligence platform dedicated to food safety and transparency.
After years in the United States, immersed in various roles spanning product development, technology, and growth, Ashar returned to Dubai. Here, she observed a burgeoning health-conscious culture marked by a proliferation of gyms, fitness clubs, and healthy eateries.
Yet, amid this health revolution, a significant gap persisted. “I observed a growing health-conscious culture with numerous gyms, fitness clubs, and healthy restaurants. However, despite this, people still frequently ate out without knowing the nutritional content of their meals,” Ashar noted.
While supermarket products came with nutrition labels, restaurant foods remained ambiguous. This revelation was more than a market gap; it was a call to action. Ashar felt a pressing need to address this transparency deficit.
“My initial idea was to create a restaurant calorie calculator to help diners understand the nutritional value of their meals. As I dug deeper, I noticed that different types of food businesses, including meal plan providers and manufacturers, approached us for nutrition analysis, leading to the evolution of NutriCal into a comprehensive food intelligence platform,” she explained.
NutriCal emerged as a comprehensive food intelligence platform that delivers detailed insights into food items and recipes. Its proprietary database is a trove of information, with over 100 data points for each entry covering nutrition, carbon footprint, allergens, and categorisation tags.
One of the platform’s core functionalities is nutrition analysis and food labelling, empowering businesses to offer consumers accurate and reliable food information.
How NutriCal Works
Database and analysis: At its core, NutriCal houses an extensive database enriched with detailed information about various food items and recipes. This database includes over 100 data points for each item, encompassing nutritional information, carbon footprint metrics, allergen presence, and categorisation tags. The data is meticulously verified and cleaned to ensure accuracy and reliability, which is critical for businesses relying on this information to provide precise food labels and nutritional analyses to their customers.
Client onboarding: The process begins with a demo session, during which potential clients’ specific requirements are understood, and the platform’s capabilities are showcased. Once a client decides to proceed, NutriCal’s team swiftly sets up their account. This includes creating login credentials and configuring the platform to meet their needs.
Recipe input and label generation: Clients can start inputting their recipes into the system. This involves entering the ingredients and quantities used in each dish. NutriCal’s platform uses this input to generate comprehensive nutrition labels, which detail the caloric content, macro and micronutrients, allergen information, and other pertinent data.
The labels can be customised to comply with different regulatory standards and formats required by the business or the region.
Advanced features: Beyond essential labelling, NutriCal offers a suite of advanced features. These include a comprehensive recipe management dashboard where businesses can manage and modify their recipes, tools for allergen tracking to ensure food safety, and carbon footprint analysis to help companies understand and minimise their environmental impact.
Continuous improvement: Building NutriCal was an incremental process fraught with challenges. The team began with a rudimentary restaurant calorie calculator, leveraging open-source nutrition data. Ashar’s collaboration with the tech team was pivotal, and as they gained traction, client feedback became instrumental in refining the product.
Requests for additional features like nutrition labels, allergen information, and a comprehensive recipe management dashboard necessitated continuous technical adjustments and iterations.
One significant hurdle was the market’s prevalence of inaccurate and unverified data. Many businesses rely on user-generated data from fitness apps, which are rife with inaccuracies.
“We had to educate our clients about the importance of accurate data and offer a solution that involved rigorous data cleanup and verification. This process was essential to ensure businesses could provide reliable nutrition information to their customers,” Ashar emphasised.
Business strategies and challenges
NutriCal employs a multifaceted strategy to connect with food businesses, leveraging inbound and outbound sales channels, participating in industry events, and capitalising on word-of-mouth referrals, especially within the UAE and the broader GCC region. The client onboarding process is streamlined: it starts with a demo to understand specific requirements and demonstrate the platform’s capabilities.
“Once they decide to proceed, we quickly set up their account, allowing them to create login credentials and start inputting recipes. From there, they can instantly generate nutrition labels and access other features, like any other SaaS platform,” Ashar described.
In 2022, a funding round from an accelerator significantly boosted NutriCal’s operations. Over the past year, the company has doubled its revenue and is poised for threefold growth this year.
The business model is subscription-based, with pricing determined by usage, averaging $1,700 per account, though it varies for enterprise accounts and smaller businesses. This model ensures scalability and meets diverse client needs while delivering reliable nutrition data.
Looking ahead, NutriCal’s vision extends beyond nutrition analysis. The aim is to offer a comprehensive food intelligence platform that encompasses various aspects of food data, including carbon footprint and allergen information.
As consumers become more health-conscious and environmentally aware, there is a growing demand for detailed food information. We plan to leverage AI and advanced data analytics to offer personalised experiences for consumers, enabling them to make informed decisions about the food they consume. Our goal is to bridge the gap between businesses and consumers, ensuring a healthier, safer, and greener future of food,” Ashar said.
