Gundo 2024: Improving people’s eating habits
Gundo is a recent app that aims to help people improve their eating habits in a simple, tech-savvy way. The user can create a profile in the platform, select their preferences and food restrictions and quickly will add to cart products from its favorite supermarket.
In this special interview for DeliveryRank, Priscila Silva, CMO and Co-Founder of Gundo, explains to us when she had the idea, what makes Gundo different from other nutrition apps and which markets will be explored in the near future.
When did you have the idea for Gundo?
This idea started in 2021 during my MBA at the IE Business School in Madrid, in a bootcamp of startups. The program, called Startup Lab, was a seven-week bootcamp where you present your idea to investors and mentors each Friday and form a team.
Our original idea was a supermarket with a disruptive layout, but not so technological and physical. However, we pivoted the project and it evolved into a product that offers delivery, but does not focus solely on it, and is integrated with the supermarket. It all started almost two years ago during my MBA studies.
Why did you choose to focus on food industry business?
I have worked in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) industry in Latin America for nearly 10 years, mainly in marketing and sales. I am interested in the food industry and my partner has a healthy lifestyle and has a background leading teams and projects in different continents. So, Gundo is a mix of both and focuses on food products, specifically in the healthy and nutritional side of them.
Gundo disclaims that it doesn’t intend to replace a nutritionist. Did you consult with a nutritionist when creating the app?
We created our first version of the algorithm with input from various nutritionists and academic specialists. Together, we created rules for diabetic, celiac, lactose-intolerant and other nutritional profiles based on an analysis of seven variables, such as vitamins, proteins, and minerals. We don’t give an average recommendation, but rather a specific one.
Our team of 8 professionals includes 2 nutritionists, who are in charge of the product.
There are many nutrition apps in the market with different scopes and goals. In your view, why is Gundo different?
There are many nutrition apps available, but we found them to fall into three groups. The first group consists of product scanner apps that allow you to scan a QR code on a product and receive information about its ingredients. While these apps are useful and informational, they have limitations as they are not personalized and provide average information.
The second group of nutrition apps focuses on calories counting and weight loss, such as MyFitnessPal, which has millions of users. These apps are good, but they can be confusing, with limited nutritional focus and they require you to manually input your daily meals.
The third group of nutrition apps provides recipes or meal plans. While these apps focus on meal planning, they are less focused on the health aspect, unlike Gundo. Also, Gundo gives both the information and the possibility to shop.
Our target audience are people with pathologies or food restrictions, and we provide a fast call to action and personalized nutrition information based on a combination of different nutrients.
What was your biggest challenge since the beginning?
The biggest challenge at the beginning was the technical aspect, like integrating with supermarkets and their APIs. Now, our biggest challenge is to get traction, finding the right people until we reach our product-market fit. We have overcome the technical challenge, since my partner and I are not technical founders, and now have developers in our team.
You explore the idea of communities. How do those communities work in Gundo?
We select communities based on nutritional profiles that are statistically more abundant. For example, 10% of the population has diabetes and 25% has non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We also consider the needs of vegetarians, almost 10% depending on the country, and pregnant women who require specific nutrients at different stages of pregnancy. These communities are more popular, have dietary restrictions and need to eat better, making our solution a necessity, not a luxury.
We are in our third month of launching and currently operating in Chile. We do not have enough data to determine which community is best for us, but we are continuously building on it.
What are Gundo’s plans for the next 3 to 5 years?
Our short-term plan this year is to improve the product-market fit through experiments on the product and marketing. We aim to make improvements based on direct feedback from our users. To attract these users, we are experimenting with different marketing channels such as social media, partnerships, influencers, and even doctors and specialists. This is the plan for this year, with the goal of reaching our big milestones.
Later this year, we plan to enter new markets such as Peru, Colombia, or Spain, as we have advanced negotiations with supermarkets in these countries. Our next step is to expand to new markets and reach new users. We are currently a B2B2C solution, so we need to attract users, but we also think about being a B2B SaaS company for big supermarkets.
