Start-Up Spotlight: Tastermonial

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their journey to success and also where they see fitness data going in the future.

For this week's spotlight, we connected with Bude Piccin, founder of Tastermonial, an app that allows individuals to log foods and measure their blood glucose response using CGMs. This allows individuals to see their glucose response on the Tastermonial app and also provides food manufacturers with valuable insight to categorize and improve their food products.

The main goal of Tastermonial is to help people make the right food choice when they buy food.

So we are in the middle between consumers who are trying to understand how their body responds to foods and the food manufacturers. We use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) as the primary wearable that we give to people to do this. To achieve our goal, we actually collaborate with food companies to obtain food kits for people to eat while recording their blood glucose response. We will also be collaborating with retailers and grocery stores soon and are now starting to go beyond just dry foods in our subscription box. Listening to our customers, they want to eat real foods so we're now partnering with food companies that can provide meal kits which will come in the form of vouchers.

What we do is tell people that we can provide them with affordable CGMs to use along with our food boxes. We make the entry price much cheaper for people because we're able to get the food companies to participate and sponsor the CGMs and food boxes so that people can learn about their glucose response and try new foods that they might not know of. The idea is that we can map the CGM data back to the different food products so that we can create a ranking for a range of different foods. The CGM data is used for personal use so that individuals who test it know how the different foods are impacting them, but this data is also useful in an aggregate form for people who are not wearing a CGM and want to know more about blood glucose responses to certain foods. Most companies in this space are focused on individuals who have the ability to pay consistently for those CGM kits and they offer the CGM at a higher price as well as in-house dieticians. Where we stand for Tastermonial is that we're filling a gap for a large number of people who cannot afford the prices for these services, ranging from 200 to 400 dollars a month. We asked ourselves: what is the best model to make this affordable? We felt that working with the food industry is the way to go.

I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes

I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with my first child. During that time, I was asked to eat low-glycemic foods and I had a diabetic educator who explained to me in detail how to look for low-glycemic foods and how to evaluate carbohydrates. For example, I was told if I wanted to eat pasta, I should have the ones that are not one-minute cook times. The longer the time it cooks, the lower the glycemic index and the better quality carbohydrates. But after going through this education, I found the practical side was still not there when I would go shopping. I would always come back and say, but how do they actually calculate the glycemic index for this food? I was surprised to find out that the glycemic index of a food item is only determined using 10 individuals. So foods that are certified low glycemic are only tested with 10 people and they average it out - even though they know that everyone responds differently. You might have a very wide range of glucose responses, so having a very limited sample size of 10 people to certify the glycemic index was difficult for me to comprehend. I dug deeper and found a lot of shortcomings in the methods used and decided that there is a way to do this better: why don't we collect more data to actually showcase the real-world impact by getting more people to test and eat the same thing?

How did you turn it into a company?

I used to live in Europe at that time and when I came to the US in 2018, I got together with software engineers in Silicon Valley and we launched our mobile application to help people make better food decisions. We started off with the functionality that people scan the barcode in the grocery store or in their pantry to detect products that are dangerous to eat or have harmful ingredients. Since I came from Europe, I mapped out all the ingredients that are banned in Europe and still allowed in the US. So those are the first features that we released. For instance, marshmallows have titanium dioxide in the US which is a toxic ingredient used in sunscreen and paint. This item is allowed in small quantities in US foods, but people can easily over-consume these sweets which makes it very dangerous if you are ingesting these toxic ingredients on a consistent basis. So we started basically detecting those things for our users based on barcode scans.

A year later, we decided to move into focusing on blood sugar because we see this as a huge opportunity to help people get healthier by reducing sugar and refined carbohydrates. We now also allow people to log foods just by taking a photo. So they can take a photo of any meal and see the glucose response of that food. We're still focused on the same thing, the holistic view of, firstly, what is a big "no-no, don't go there" food category. And secondly, also adding a "decent" food category. What should you eat more of or what is more nutritious? And that's what we want Tastermonial to lead people to.

We source clean-label food products or food products that have healthy or high-quality ingredients for our subscription food box.

Individuals who work with their own dieticians already, dieticians can also work with Tastermonial. So we don't have dietitians in-house, that's our first differentiation. And the second uniqueness is that, since we work with a lot of food manufacturers, we can obtain these clean-label food products. So we source these products, including supplements, and actually give them to people to test because to know what's good for you is one thing, but applying it is the hard part. If you don't have food in front of you and you're hungry, you will likely go for a sub-optimal option even though you know it's bad. So that's where we come in and we just give the food to people so they can really try it out.

The aggregated data also goes back to food companies, who are able to position it in the right place and improve their food product.

This allows food manufacturers to be able to say that while a certain product is in the range of being diabetic-friendly, it may not be diabetic-friendly for everyone. So, if you are curious, test it yourself. At this point, we're just collecting the data and sharing the responses of users so that people can see: "hey, this is what happened to people similar to me". It's up to the individuals to decide if they trust it or not, but at least we share those facts so they can compare two products and actually see the difference. We will eventually want to help certify those products as well.

The best use of our app today is for individuals who want to wear a CGM to run personalized food experiments.

What we currently recommend to our users is based on approximating metrics, like the carb-to-fiber ratio. If it's too high, then we say: "hey, this product is too high in refined carbohydrates, it is likely ultra-processed". Users can also run food experiments, say for example eat one serving of this meal while wearing a CGM and then don't do anything after. The next day, take a 10-minute walk after your meal. On the third day, have more fiber and find what works best for you to see the difference. A second experiment would be: suppose you are always hungry in the afternoon, but you don't want to overeat and have a slump in your energy so we would give you a food box with different nutrition bars. To ensure that your body is not influenced by exercise, stress, etc. we ask that you eat the bar when you have a blood glucose reading within a certain range and not to eat, drink or perform any strenuous exercise two hours before the test. This way you can then get an accurate glucose response for the different nutrition bars and compare them to see what works best for you.

Biggest challenge so far?

The biggest challenge is to get people to follow the instructions :) even for myself, if I know that I need to test something like the nutrition bar and I see a coffee shop nearby, I want coffee. So it can be pretty hard to fast for two hours without drinking anything but water. We're working through this in our backend using AI to filter out the noise and reduce the instructions people need to follow.

We want to map accurate glucose responses for the entire aisle of foods in a grocery store.

Our focus now is to get as many people as possible in our app wearing CGM's and testing different foods to get as much data as we can. Before we launched our subscription food box a couple of months ago, we actually spent the previous 12 months working with food and supplement companies to run trials.

We collected a lot of information on the glycemic response of different nutrition bars and of one supplement. What is very surprising is we found there's not much correlation between the food label and the glycemic response range. So we compared eight different nutrition bars. Of course, the worst one is very obvious, it's the one with the highest refined carbs. The carbohydrate amount does allow you to compare the worst and the best products, but it's not allowing accurate comparisons of all the ones in between. We found when trying to compare the nutrition bars, the ones that performed the best are actually the ones formulated with maple syrup or dates and not the ones with alternatives to sugar. So a lot of this information provides us with a reflection that maybe eating real sugar is not that bad, it's all about controlling the amount and having enough fibre in the food. There could be other ingredients that impact the quality of those sugars. For example, the bars with maple syrup also contain raw cashew nuts which could be causing the reduction in the glycemic response for that bar. So we found a very striking difference in terms of the glycemic response range of different products, but what we understand from our study compared with looking at the nutrition label is that the label seems to be totally misleading. For example, we found that the calorie number has no correlation at all with the range of glucose responses that we've seen.

What would you say are the biggest issues in the space today?

The prohibitive cost is one. CGM devices, which are very useful for many people, are not easily accessible. Even for people with diagnosed type II diabetes, many of them cannot afford CGMs and the device is not covered by insurance. So that's the biggest issue. The second issue is the practical side of implementing and sticking to a healthier diet. The problem is people like what they like to eat, so if you don't give them another option to replace it they would try to make a change for a certain period of time and then revert back to their habits. And changing habits is very difficult. The only way to do it is to find a substitute for whatever they're used to. The only way to do that effectively, I believe, is to get the food manufacturers to participate as well.

Around 90% of people who are pre-diabetic don't even know it.

I think more people should be trying out a CGM. Even though it's a fairly short period of time - just 14 days or a month - you would already get an understanding of where you are in terms of glucose response. I was surprised because the more I talked about this project, the more I get friends calling me saying someone they know someone diagnosed with pre-diabetes who is only 33 years old! Someone else was also telling me how their sister-in-law had polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCO), which is a hormone imbalance that leads to a type of pre-diabetes. The research now suggests it's actually a kind of insulin resistance syndrome and is linked to managing your blood glucose. Now, we don't try to understand and say what the exact cause is, but it's very clear that to manage the symptoms you need to manage your blood glucose.

The more you talk about these things, the more you are aware of people having pre-diabetic conditions and they are hidden everywhere. People seek treatments or improve their diet when they know about it, but there are so many people that don't know their glucose response and that's where using a CGM wearable, even for a few weeks, could give you a better understanding and allow you to make small, preventative adjustments.

How are you currently using health data?

So our app is used to record the CGM data for individuals and it flows into our database. It then gets pushed to our web app, which currently is internal. We use the web app to export the data for analysis and the aggregated data for food companies to interpret the results. So that's one thing. Each individual user who subscribed to our food boxes also gets to see their CMG data on the app and they get a personalised glycemic report. In the future, our backend web app would be made accessible to food companies and people who wish to access the aggregated data.

What do you see for the future of Tastermonial and the space in general?

We don't want to just stick to the glucose response data, because that is only a short-term evaluation of the impact of foods on health. We want to eventually be able to measure the long-term impact as well. That could be looking at the triglyceride content or the level of fat in the liver. The level of fat in the liver is important because fructose does not appear in your immediate glucose response, so it gets hidden and has a deteriorating impact on your body in the long term.

The hope is that glucose-tracking wearables will move into non-invasive monitoring in the future. We are already discussing this with a wearable provider that is working on non-invasive glucose monitoring so that when it's ready and gets FDA approval, we'll be able to incorporate the device and make CGMs even more affordable for people.

Anything else you'd like to mention?

Blood glucose data is just one metric, but it's a kind of metric that we have never had continuous data for until recently. The Holy Grail though is really to understand how all this plays out together. How these immediate responses versus many other biomarkers play out to better evaluate people's health and what food works best for them.