Naturegrade
Helping people understand food beyond calories
Hi everyone,
We’re Ian and Pauline from Singapore.
After years of writing about food, health, and wellness, we became increasingly frustrated that most nutrition apps focus heavily on calories and macros.
But when people ask whether a food is healthy, they’re usually asking something much broader:
What’s in it?
How processed is it?
Does it support long-term health?
That’s why we started building Naturegrade, an AI-powered app that analyses food quality, ingredients, processing, additives, and eating patterns.
Our goal isn’t to help people count more numbers. It’s to help people better understand the food they eat every day.
Drawing from our backgrounds in technology, food writing, and wellness, we wanted to create a tool that brings together food quality, practical nutrition, and AI in a way that’s simple and useful.
We’d love feedback from fellow founders:
Do you think consumers are becoming more interested in food quality than calorie counting?
2 Comments
Yes, but I would not frame it as people moving from calories to quality. I think the winning UX is calories/macros as the fast familiar hook, then food quality as the layer that makes the log feel useful after the first scan. Biggest retention lever is still input friction: if photo/barcode/text capture is not fast, users never reach the insight layer.
I think consumers are becoming more interested in food quality, but I’d be careful framing this as “quality vs calories” too broadly.
The sharper question is probably: who feels enough anxiety about ingredients, processing, and additives to change behavior now?
A casual wellness user may like Naturegrade, but a parent, someone managing long-term health, or someone already reading labels may feel the pain much faster.
That first-user choice matters because the product could easily become “better nutrition info” instead of a decision tool people actually return to.
Happy to put the tighter first-user and positioning angle in writing if useful. This feels like a product where the initial segment matters more than the general trend.