Image Credit : Copyright(c) Nutracheck 2015
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Project Overview
If you’re a healthy weight in the UK today, you're in the minority. We're getting heavier as a nation, and obesity increases your risk of health-related conditions including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Set aside 10 minutes a day to eat, track and lose weight with Nutracheck’s calorie counter and food diary App.
Self-awareness of how many calories you’re consuming helps you to lose weight and keep it off. Scan a barcode and add to your diary in just 2 clicks. Photos of foods make it superfast to spot what you ate. Isn’t your health worth 10 minutes?
Organisation
Team
The Nutracheck App was the brainchild of Tim Vryenhoef. Back in the late 1990s, whilst working for a major food retailer, Tim had the idea of linking a product's nutritional information with its barcode. He developed a programme on a Psion Organiser and showed it to a colleague, Rachel Hartley, who was the Product Manager for a calorie counted sandwich range. For lifelong dieter Rachel, an electronic way to calorie count was genius!
In 2000, Tim discovered a small hand-held device called a 'C-Pen' on the Internet which could scan barcodes and display data on a small screen. The concept for Nutracheck - a barcode scanning, calorie counting App was born.
The initial development team in 2005 consisted of Tim Vryenhoef who designed the App and functionality, Paul Cookson, an IT whizz who coded it and created the barcode-linked UK food database, and Rachel Hartley, a marketer obsessed with weight loss and nutrition and a desire to get under the skin of customers and understand what they want.
It's worth saying that Tim is a self-confessed tech geek. He has a degree in maths - so no formal IT qualifications - but a passion for all things tech-related. He envisages fridges in the future that will communicate their contents anytime via radio frequency tags, and supermarket trolleys to give you a running update of the nutritional value of your shop.
The first Nutracheck App was launched on 21 February 2005 - two years before the App Store - and the first Nutracheck App was a Java program. As there were many mobile platforms, we had to test the App on multiple handsets to check it could be supported. Back then, camera functionality in mobile phones wasn't good enough to read a barcode, but we still used the concept of linking a barcode to nutrition data and created unique 'Barcode QuickSearch'. A user could type in the last 4 digits of a barcode to bring back a shortlist of products.
Of course the value of the App lay in the quality of the food database behind it. As no such barcode-linked nutrition database existed in the UK, we had to create one. After contacting food manufacturers and retailers to request information, and discovering they either didn't hold it or the format was unusable, we took a hands-on approach and physically collected the data from the product packaging ourselves. At launch, the food database contained 30,000 products. We've kept adding to it and today, 10 years on, we have data for over 180,000 UK foods. But we’ve also gone one step further and added photos of the products for ease of recognition.
The three founding directors are still involved in the App development, however the team has grown and has dedicated developers for the iOS and Android platforms, a Database Manager responsible for improving the quality and usability of the huge food database, plus a customer support team.
Project Brief
Nutracheck was the first mobile calorie counter App in the UK when it launched in 2005. Fast forward 10 years, and today it's one of the top grossing diet Apps in the UK App Store; daily downloads have even exceeded that of industry giant Weight Watchers on occasions.
Apps can make your life easier. They educate, they entertain - and the Nutracheck App might literally save your life. Sounds dramatic? Not really: when you lose 10 stone - and keep it off - as members like Steve (regular blogger) and Chris (in our Success Gallery) have done, the benefits are both life-changing and long lasting. Life-limiting health conditions have been reversed, life expectancy has increased and the future is looking good.
So what sets the Nutracheck App apart in the saturated health App market? We were the first to market, we’re still the fastest and we believe we’re the best because our customers tell us so. Our attention to detail in the design and functionality sets us apart, making our App faster and easier to use. For example, we’ve minimised the number of clicks needed to add food, and added photos for speedy recognition. Our search results remember what you ate last time. All small things that add up to make tracking your diet easy and enjoyable and most definitely not a chore.
As the Daily Mail said: "of all the calorie counter Apps, this is one of the very best".
Project Need
We’ve won four national awards for innovation, and 10 years on we are continually developing innovative features to keep our App at the top. Here are some of the innovations that set us apart from our competitors:
• We have the UK's largest food database linked to barcodes
• We show you photos of food to make it easier to find what you ate
• It takes just 2 clicks to scan and add a food (less than a leading US competitor)
• We have a dedicated Data Manager who maintains the quality of the food database.
• UK customer care team and nutritionists are available 7 days a week: no-one else offers that level of personal service
Nutracheck is more than 'just an App' – it’s a weight management service. Members value the personal 1:1 experience, judging by the App Store review below:
"When I tweeted about NutraCheck about how many calories was in my favourite breakfast, I got a reply with tips on how I could cut down the fat in it. I find it very useful for an app company to speak to the customers using twitter because it's almost instant & you're speaking to a real person! Very Happy with it all :)" by Team Koala Jan 24, 2015
Around 1 in 4 adults in the UK is obese; we’re fighting a constant battle to stay a healthy weight. Our environment and convenience-obsessed lifestyle stack the odds against us: we simply haven't evolved sufficiently to cope with an abundant supply of calorie-dense food, available 24/7.
But we now have the tools to fight back. Apps on our phones are with us all the time and the increasing number of health Apps reflects our growing obsession with 'quantitative self': measuring and monitoring all aspects our body and wellness.
Weight management is all about balancing calories in (food) and calories out (exercise). If we know how much we should eat, and we have an App that keeps track for us, there's no excuse!
User Experience
Using Nutracheck becomes a daily habit. Many members tell us they have become reliant on it, they feel seriously lost without it. We asked how long they spend keeping their food diary. Less than 10 minutes a day was the answer.
The Nutracheck App connects with Apple's HealthKit for iPhone users who wish to aggregate their data. We have also teamed up with Fitbit, the global leader in connected health and fitness. Members can link their Fitbit activity tracker to Nutracheck to sync steps to their Nutracheck diary and daily calorie totals to their Fitbit dashboard. We plan to expand such link ups to enhance the user experience for connected diet and fitness.
Our focus has always been on speed of use - hence features like the home screen calorie badge (iOS) and widget (Android) which let members see at a glance their calorie allowance for day without even opening the App.
We conduct regular usability trials to see how a new user interacts with the App. Observing someone's first time experience of downloading and registering on the App provides invaluable insight. As a result, we have fine-tuned certain features and added instruction overlays to help a new user get started.
In an ongoing survey sent to new users, we ask how easy or difficult they found the App was to use. 86% said 'easy' or 'very easy'. But we still keep striving to improve usability further.
Project Marketing
To date, we have grown Nutracheck by word of mouth recommendation to over 1,000,000 registered users. In a recent survey 91% said they had recommended Nutracheck.
As a small business, we don't have a huge marketing budget; instead we rely on social media channels to raise awareness of the brand, using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to connect with a wider audience.
We have also established some important partnerships, which have helped in raising brand awareness. We provide a Calorie Checker tool for the NHS Choices website; this tool carries the Nutracheck logo and has a link to our website. We also partner with Fitbit, the global leader in the connected health and fitness category. Anyone with a Fitbit can link it to Nutracheck through the App (or website) and we sync activity data into the Nutracheck diary. We run Fitbit challenges and competitions for members, work with Fitbit's digital team to promote these on Fitbit’s Facebook page as well as our own, and we sell Fitbit devices on the Nutracheck website.
Nutracheck is a subscription service so we don't take advertising to protect the customer experience. From time to time, we will promote carefully selected, relevant products to our members. We have a partnership with Tefal and promote certain items with a health benefit, for example the Actifry range. Such high profile partnerships help to raise the awareness and profile of the Nutracheck brand.
Project Privacy
We adhere to the Data Protection Act and treat members privacy with the utmost care. Our privacy statement is presented clearly in plain English for ease of understanding. It is cross-referenced in our Terms and Conditions of use. A link to the Terms and Conditions is displayed on our home page and also where we collect members' information where they join up to the service, so they can click through to the Privacy Policy and check how we will use their data.
We ensure that our internal administrative procedures are in line with supporting our privacy statement, to ensure that data is personally non-identifiable. It is our policy to continually review our privacy and security measures in the light of the changing environment and legislation.
We only collect minimal personal data from visitors to provide them with our services and let them interact with our website. Nutracheck has a closed forum community. Members of the community are able to set their privacy settings to choose what personal information can be viewed by others. Cookies are required to deliver our online service – and this is clearly explained in our Cookie policy.
It is not our policy to pass or sell our members data to a third parties, so our members will never receive unsolicited mail as a result of sharing their email address with us.
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