Blendful—Pesticide Testing Your Favorite Foods, Looking for non-technical Co-founder and feedback please! :)
Hi everyone. I'm a technical founder who's built a MVP of a crowdfunding product intended to fund spectroanalysis testing on popular foods for contaminants, pesticides, herbicides, etc.
Right now food products are a sort of black box, and consumers don't really know what they're getting. I'm looking to elucidate those details.
I'd like to bring on board anyone who's interested, but primary looking for business development people who would be responsible for partnerships, growth, and marketing, so I can work on the product.
Would also love any feedback and/or ideas if you find this useful.
Thanks so much for reading!
Hi Nikk
Great initiative - this is a topic I particularly care about. There is a great tag line here - how healthy are your healthy foods?
I've got a few ideas on how to take this further:
Intuitively, if testing "only" costs $500 for a single product, I'd team up with NGOs or Health Associations in a partnership whereby they fund the analysis and you are responsible for building content around the results, possibly with PR and social media backing. Therefore I'd avoid reaching out to hundreds of people to collect small amounts, and would agree with HenriNext re cost of acquisition.
Business model wise, crowdfunding survives on a 5-7% success fee applied to a capital base of many million $. How would you make money here? I would say an app with freemium model, or ads. Have a look at Yuka in France, they have done a great job (https://yuka.io/en/). Their model suggests there is no need to have biological / chemical scan of the physical product, but instead that reading the label is enough to provide guidance to consumers. Perhaps here you could replicate that model and offer spectroanalysis for premium users that agree to pay a monthly fee.
Engage with consumer associations. Some of them already scan products and publish reviews.
Fund a scan campaign on kids products and publish a review of results. Same for Healthy Snacking. Advertise with Parenting / Health bloggers and social media influencers.
These idea assume that sample size is well understood across countries and does not cost more than a few dozen $ to supply.
My background is M&A and I've worked on more than 15 acquisitions, sale or fundraising in the Food sector, mainly in Europe. More than happy to discuss further.
Further reading: https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2019/08/20/Evaluating-the-Yuka-phenomenon-How-effective-is-the-scanning-app-in-practice
@Aurel hi there. Do you have a email I can contact you on a you don’t have one in your bio?
@aurels hi there. Do you have an email I can contact you on please as you don’t have one in your profile?
The one you want does not end with a "s" ;-) @Marvee
Agh thank you!
Been digesting this over the last day and it's proven to be tremendously useful. Thank you so much. I will do my best to internalize your feedback and build a better product thereof.
I do plan on doing something like Yuka, but not sure if that's necessary yet. Could be a necessary pivot; will have to test the waters to see. Just trying to get some traction as of now. Great feedback though, thank you so much.
Well... I'd love to have your idea succeed and the site looks really good, but (there is always a 'but', isn't there?)...
.. How on earth you manage to find enough people interested in crowdfunding testing of the exact same item, out of tens of thousands of common food items?
.. And how you manage variations between samples, and especially between batches?
Hey, thanks for the feedback! Really really really really appreciate it. Can't overstate that.
The points you make are good ones, and are on my radar.
To your question about too large a plurality of food items with not enough interest; I actually don't think this is true, but I can't formally prove it. My intuition is that the demographic that would care about contaminant testing of food would focus on a narrow spectrum of the food supply—mostly health foods. In the US the manufactured # of health foods are probably in the low 1000's, with several hundred receiving most of the attention. Think energy bars like LARABAR, Clif, a few dozen health cereals, etc. The ratio of health foods vs. # of people who consume those foods is high, so if even 1% of a food item's audience would be interested in testing their that product, it would be enough to fund a test. Keep in mind that spectroanalysis testing is relatively cheap so you'd only need a dozen people or so to fund a test.
Re: variations between batches, and related concerns—in some countries this is federally regulated, you have to have a large enough sample size to have the test accredited. This is not the case in the US but I am opting for controls like these, i.e.—purchasing 5 indistinguishable items from 5 different stores, and mixing the entire batch. I would defer to consumers to see if they would be interested in following up with another test a few months after an initial one had been released to see if there is a significant amount of variation batch to batch.
Hope this helps, but would love to hear your thoughts on any of these points. Thanks so much Henri!
Good thinking regarding the focus on health foods, that changes the first problem by an order of magnitude.
Finding a cost-efficient channel to reach the dozen people willing to pay $20 for spectroanalysis of specific healthy cereal may still prove to be a pretty tough problem:
.. People don't have enough "intent" for that to work through Google ads, or through direct/intent content marketing / SEO.
.. And generic/no-intent health-focused content marketing in insanely competed.
..Health aficionados are too expensive segment, probably 10-20X too expensive, to target through Facebook ads for ~$20 donation.
.. Until donating/pledging starts to yield results quickly, there is does-this-ever-work problem.
.. And you'll always have the disincentive "I'll just wait for somebody else to pay".
But again, please remember I'm just playing Devil's Advocate, and I do sincerely wish you'll succeed (and If you'd operate in Australia I'd probably pledge towards testing some of my most common health foods).
Good luck!
Appreciate it! These will be the challenges I will be working hard to overcome. Have a few tricks up my sleeve. Will keep each of your points in mind. Thanks so much!