LeanSpoon - Healthy food along with nutrition advice

“One size fits all” – gone are those days when one plan fit most of the people, especially diet plans. Before one diet plan suited majority of people, but today with different lifestyles and differing schedules of people, diet plans are also becoming unique from individual to individual.

With today’s modern thought of wife and husband working, it becomes very difficult to manage healthy food. When couple, Gopi Lingala and Saneesha Rao realized that this problem struck their work life balance as well, they looked out for a permanent solution, thus pioneering LeanSpoon – Personalized meal plans for every individual’s health goods.

Birth of the startup

Gopi used to work for approximately 12-14 hours a day and was forced to have his meals at office due to his busy schedule. While Gopi was running errands at work already, Saneesha was also craving for a special healthy diet during her pregnancy. As a result, the duo visited several nutritionists and tested various food delivery services that offered to deliver healthy food at home. When nothing worked in the couple’s favour, they felt the gap in the market and realized that having healthy and balanced diet was a time taking effort. This led to brainstorming and the result of it is LeanSpoon – founded in May 2016.

“Getting a multi-course meal that is nutritionally balanced across both macro nutrients—fat, protein, carbs—and micro-nutrients—fibre, vitamins and minerals—and that is flexible to portion control for different dietary requirements is an intricate solution. And doing this for a rotating menu that does not repeat for ten weeks is a complex task,” says Gopi.

Gopi is a masters in Science, specializing in International Business. He brings 13 years of work experience in the BPO and consulting sector, with a focus on services supply chain management. On the other hand, wife Saneesha is a computer science engineer, who began her career as a technical artist in game development before she took up painting and sculpting full time when she moved to Latin America.

The startup when begun its operation was bootstrapped with the personal savings of the duo and a bank loan. With this, they managed to assemble a team of skilled nutritionists and chefs to prepare meal plans based on individual health requirements. Today, this startup has a manpower of over 20 people which includes a culinary team and a nutritionist team. They select only nutritionists with a degree in nutrition and a good understanding of the science backed by work experience at hospitals.

How does the service work?

• Logon to LeanSpoon’s official website and fill up the onboarding form
• Next, you will be asked to select and schedule your meals
• Once you do this, you will get customized reports and personalized meals at the delivery address

The startup has subscription plans for all its customers. You can choose to subscribe either for a weekly, monthly or quarterly pack. The weekly pack has 5 meals, while the later has 22 and 70 meals respectively.

The customer has the flexibility to take only nutrition advice or include breakfast and/or lunch packs as part of their subscription. The monthly subscription to this costs Rs. 9,000, while a quarterly subscription to all three costs Rs. 25,000. The average meal pack comes to around Rs 175 – 205, including nutrition advice, portion controlling, delivery and tax.

The option of taking nutrition advice comes in a pack – it includes a personal nutritionist for each customer to understand his/her health goals. The advisor asks the customer for his/her medical background and works with the kitchen team and other nutritionists to come up with customized meals.

When you subscribe for nutrition advice, the nutritionist can be reached through a call, email or chat for any queries related to nutrition, health, and exercise.

Future plans

Currently, this diet startup fulfills over 1,000 orders in a month. Looking forward to 2017, the startup aims to open its second production center in the city and is planning to take the number of meals it delivers to 25,000 per month.

“Over the next 2-3 years, we are looking at leveraging technology, including wearables, to gather the data to further customize our offering for users. We are also looking to working with diagnostic testing and genetic testing to help people personalize and plan their health goals accordingly,” says Gopi

Kudos Gopi and Saneesha. This is really a healthy step up toward a healthy and balanced youth in the future!

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