Boone, a start-up tech company based at Norwich Research Park, has launched a new app to help people eat healthier meals by aligning an individual’s diet to their genetic make-up.
Boone founder, Murray Dare, has developed the app to support people, organisations and sports clubs in their desire to improve diets, eat healthier meals and generally feel better and fitter. Because each person’s DNA is different, individuals will respond differently to food and ingredients. So, people who sign up to the app will need to provide a saliva sample that will be used to define and record their genetic make-up and will get uploaded to their app profile.
The app will enable people to use their mobile phone to take a photo of their meal, or the bar/QR codes on food packaging. It will then build a food log to highlight potential nutrient deficiencies and provide ‘real-time’ advice on how to enhance the nutrient intake with alternative or additional ingredients, based on each individual’s age, gender, metabolism, body make-up and DNA traits. Users will be given feedback on each meal so that they can make their own empowered choices of how they can improve their diet over time.
Dare explains where his motivation came from, “I got ‘obsessed’ with running and noticed how directly my diet would affect my speed and that improvements could be made merely by changing elements of my diet. I also noticed that my wife could eat more chocolate than I could without it affecting her, whereas my body didn’t seem to like saturated fats.
“The Boone app has been designed to empower people to make better meal choices. We are not trying to dictate what people should eat but instead to empower individuals with bespoke nutritional insights and recommendations designed for them and their DNA make-up. A huge proportion of the UK’s population has vitamin deficiencies which has been linked to multiple areas of health such as mental health, sleep and the menopause.”
Now that the first phase of the app has been launched, Boone is turning its attention to the sports organisation side of the business with a planned UK roll-out first, followed by entry into the US market where college sports teams will be the main target due to their vast turnover of players. Boone is also keen to work in the women’s sports arena as it sees the use of the app being a real benefit to them.
Boone is currently in the process of raising £350,000 in seed round funding to develop the sports dimension and has had a lot of interest from a mix of venture capital investors, investment syndicates and professional footballers. The Boone sports team app is being designed to run alongside a sports club’s own performance data. To help the development of the app in this sector, Boone is looking to run pilot trials with volunteer clubs in the county.
Dare believes that his business is in exactly the right place to succeed, saying, “Norwich Research Park is absolutely the perfect place in the world to develop Boone because we have four world-leading research institutes, UEA and the hospital all on the same campus plus Norwich City Football Club is nearby. It’s very rare you get this combination!”
Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, the campus management organisation for Norwich Research Park, said, “Norwich Research Park hosts national research capabilities focused on the link between diet, nutrition and disease prevention so it is great to see that Boone has join the campus and is benefiting from these expertise in the development of its app. Boone has received help from the AIP team to make the right connections with potential collaborators in the fields of nutrition and human health. We will continue to support Boone as it rolls out phase one of its proposition.”
