myWellaBee: hyper-personalized food as medicine marketplace

Food allergy and anaphylaxis are an increasing public health and economic burden. Food allergies affect about 7% of the US population and the prevalence is increasing, with a disproportionate impact on urban and African American communities. In 2021, an estimated 7.6% of Black children had a food allergy, compared with 5.3% of white children. In 2023, within the SAPPHIRE trial cohort, African American participants were significantly more likely to report food allergy (26.1% vs 17%) and have food-associated anaphylactic symptoms (12.7% vs 7%) when compared with European American participants. Environmental factors can also increase risk for fatal anaphylaxis from food allergies, and a disproportionate number of minorities live in urban settings with increased allergen exposures. Further, the hygiene hypothesis postulates that processed and unhealthy foods contribute to the development of food allergy due to the disruption of the gut microbiome. African Americans and marginalized groups are also more likely to live in areas where there is less access to affordable healthy food options. Additionally, families of those diagnosed with food allergy will often struggle to find safe, affordable food for their loved ones. Being able to easily avoid food allergens is vital to prevent potentially life-threatening allergic reactions and hospitalizations. 

To date, little is known about how best to support individuals and families to find safe foods to improve quality of life, reduce associated mental health issues, and prevent potentially life-threatening allergic reactions. Currently, there is no optimal technology that exists to assist patients suffering from food allergies and intolerances in the community with buying safe food products. Once patients leave the clinic diagnosed with a food allergy, they often struggle to find appropriate, nutritious food and children often become picky, spare eaters. For these patients and their families, shopping is often a minefield - causing added stress and undue economic burden to their already busy lives. This project will further develop novel technology for improved management of food allergies with a focus on population sub-groups that are disproportionately impacted.

This project will develop new technology powered by AI and Dietitians for improved management of food allergies and intolerances.

Our multidisciplinary team will develop a hyper-peronsalized food as medicine marketplace that builds upon an in-market Beta (mywellabee.com), applying artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs to enable individuals to accurately find safe foods. The main hypothesis is that an artificial intelligence powered search engine, applying deep learning based knowledge extraction and evidence-based fact checking, and using a team of dietitians to integrate and enrich public datasets with data read from publicly available product, recipe and risk data, will be more effective than conventional search methods. 

Our novel approach will empower individuals with the ability to discover safe food based on any combination of dietary needs and/or ingredient-exclusion to find accurate - and thereby safe results. 

Product Demo: 

The overriding goal is to enable individuals to avoid allergic reactions, some of which can be life-threatening. 

For the patient, personalized support to easily discover allergen-free foods is not readily accessible; it typically requires individuals to rely on highly trained allergy specialists for diagnosis and support. 

At this stage, the challenge to the community allergist is providing continuing aid to their patients after the initial diagnosis. Many patients have poor health literacy, and are often confused by instructions given during their visit, and community allergists ultimately may not have a dietetics network to rely on to aid patients in navigating their condition. Even if they do, the need for a dietitian presents another barrier for the patient to engage and gain the personalized support they need to self-manage their food allergies for themselves and their loved ones effectively.

This project will extend and enhance current approaches to managing food allergies and intolerances by: 

(i) supporting allergists with a highly specialized tool for improving their delivery of patient care, 

(ii) enabling individuals to easily search for safe foods using a free digital technology that is accessible, and

 (iii) developing an online platform for dietitians to identify patients’ individual food sensitivities and tailor a personalized diet around them.

Further, this project will benefit the community at large by transforming how households identify safe foods, thereby reducing associated stress and anxiety. The project will aim to reduce household expenditure and associated downstream public healthcare costs (e.g., hospital admissions), provide highly skilled jobs, and support the development of the food service system. 

Most importantly, we aim to keep this resource free for end-users, democratizing access to all. 

Our team is a multidisciplinary, international group of allergy specialists, dietitians, public health and computer science researchers, and commercialisation experts. We are well placed to conduct this research and put it into practice with key personnel outlined below:

Dr Nerissa D’Silva (UTMB) is an Allergy Physician, Houston ENT & Allergy, cofounder of myWellaBee.com. 

Professor Michael Witbrock (Univ. Auckland) (h-index 37; 3400 citations) leads the Strong AI Lab (SAIL) with over 37 years of experience. He was a distinguished researcher at IBM T J Watson Research Center and VP for research at Cycorp, a leader in semantic knowledge representation and knowledge graphs (KG) and is an angel investor and advisor to myWellaBee

Aziz Shariff (Founder of mywellabee.com) has over 14 years of international corporate food industry experience at Mars Inc. (global food company) with a track record of bringing disruptive innovation to market.

The developed Extract Transform Load (ETL) system will be deployed on a cloud service: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and will require AWS SageMaker services to support Machine Learning integration that builds upon the Product Entity Matching prototype developed by myWellaBee, which will facilitate an efficient path to production. 

We will then transform product data with an in-house team of dietitians, nutritionists, allergists, and gastroenterologists using myWellaBee’s proprietary enriched database. Product transformation includes myWellaBee’s team of dietitians/nutritionists (under the supervision of Allergy and GI specialists) labeling each product in the enriched database with dietary tags that fit their ingredient list and description. We also intend to pilot the use of LLMs (however, intentionally constraining it to use evidence based data from knowledge graphs) to accelerate and automate workflows for the team of dietitians/nutritionists. Examples of these tags include “free from-”, vegan, low fodmap etc. The eventual goal will be to include specific medical diets including but not limited to celiac, EOE, cardiac, renal, diabetic etc.  

Currently we already have an established international team in place that has validated the proof of concept in both New Zealand and Australia - two english speaking multicultural markets. We intend to leverage the learnings from the Australia and New Zealand pilots - and apply the proven practices with local regional Texan retailers as well as national US brands with support from funding from the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

Concurrently, with IRB approval, we plan to undertake a needs analysis with end-users with support from University of Texas Medical Brand (UTMB) and other community clinics. This will consist of a questionnaire given out to current food allergic patients about their quality of life with food allergies. Specifically, how they currently shop for safe foods and if there would be interest in using technology to assist.

We have a Beta that is live in both Australia and New Zealand (mywellabee.com) where users can search for food that's right for them by any combination of food allergy, dietary preference and even ingredient exclusion or inclusion - all free of charge to the end user.

Building on this, thanks to a community implementation grant from the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) we will introduce and test this concept in the US market starting in the State of Texas later this year.

To date, we have served over 90,000 users and growing across Australia and New Zealand, with over 10 customers (e.g. food brands and retailers like B-Corp certified brands - Blue Frog Breakfast, Almighty Drinks, Woolworths New Zealand and more) with an ARR of $100,000 (despite bootstrapping) with our user growth and revenue set to double within the next 6 months as we gain stronger pull from both existing and prospective food and retailer brand partners. Plus, we're also getting pull from Health Insurance providers like AIA that see value in our Food as Medicine platform to better serve their members and reduce healthcare costs (monetisation option we're exploring)

We are aim to raise a Seed round to expand myWellaBee into North America and the UK and require guidance from the Solve mentors to help us sharpen and refine our pitch to secure a reputable and values aligned Lead seed investor. We have follower investors lined up; but need help to secure the right reputable US lead seed investor.

In addition, we require guidance to help us build a robust governance board that can guide us on the tech, commercial, food regulatory, patient advocacy and marketing elements to enable us to realize the full global potential of myWellaBee.

Allergy as a subspecialty does not yet lean heavily on advancing technology to aid and support patients. There are a very limited number of web or mobile-based applications specifically designed to support clinical allergy practice, and only a few organizations that support food-allergic patients through their medical journey. The practice of clinical allergy in the community setting is mostly limited to printed hand-outs and verbal instruction during appointments to inform and teach their patients about their condition.

This project will develop new technology for improved management of food allergies and intolerances within the existing, knowledge-intensive, dietetics industry. 

Our multidisciplinary team will develop a novel hyper-personalized marketplace that builds upon an in-market Beta (mywellabee.com), applying artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs to enable individuals to accurately find safe foods. The main hypothesis is that an artificial intelligence powered search engine, applying deep learning based knowledge extraction and evidence-based fact checking, and using a team of dietitians to integrate and enrich public datasets with data read from publicly available product, recipe and risk data, will be more effective than conventional search methods. 

Our novel approach will empower individuals with the ability to discover safe food based on any combination of dietary needs and/or ingredient-exclusion to find accurate - and thereby safe results.

myWellabee is a global platform that aims to make the complex world of food simple and easy to navigate by transforming the way consumers are able to search for food to meet their dietary needs in a safe and affordable manner. 

The overriding goal is to enable individuals to avoid allergic reactions, some of which can be life-threatening. For the patient, personalized support to easily discover allergen-free foods is not readily accessible; it typically requires individuals to rely on highly trained allergy specialists for diagnosis and support. At this stage, the challenge to the community allergist is providing continuing aid to their patients after the initial diagnosis. Many patients have poor health literacy, and are often confused by instructions given during their visit, and community allergists ultimately may not have a dietetics network to rely on to aid patients in navigating their condition. Even if they do, the need for a dietitian presents another barrier for the patient to engage and gain the personalized support they need to self-manage their food allergies for themselves and their loved ones effectively.

This project will extend and enhance current approaches to managing food allergies and intolerances by: 

(i) supporting allergists with a highly specialized tool for improving their delivery of patient care, 

(ii) enabling individuals to easily search for safe foods using a free digital technology that is accessible, and

 (iii) developing an online platform for dietitians to identify patients’ individual food sensitivities and tailor a personalized diet around them.

Further, this project will benefit the community at large by transforming how households identify safe foods, thereby reducing associated stress and anxiety. The project will aim to reduce household expenditure and associated downstream public healthcare costs (e.g., hospital admissions), provide highly skilled jobs, and support the development of the food service system. Most importantly, we aim to keep this resource free for end-users, democratizing access to all. 

Utilizing Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide accurate, lifesaving data on food products for those with food allergies and specific medical dietary requirements.

This innovation addresses critical health issues where errors can have severe consequences, improving safety and wellbeing for affected individuals.

Deploy specialized Large Language Models trained on unique datasets to improve data accuracy and establish trust, with the aim of expanding this solution on a global scale.

Full time staff = 1

Rest of our team working part-time (including contractors) until we're able to secure Seed funding

3 years from idea inception to revenue generating Beta in 2 countries (Australia and NZ) with plans and support to introduce this into the United States

To realize the full global potential of myWellaBee, we’ve recruited a passionate team that's diverse by design (gender, geography, skill-set and domain knowledge).

We’ve taken the same approach with our advisors as well

We are building a 2-sided marketplace, where:

1.) We intend to keep myWellaBee FREE for users to rapidly build up our user-base & democratize access to our marketplace.

On monetization front:

1.) We intend to take a commission in line with benchmarks of 12-15% for every transaction on myWellaBee (note: we intend to use Marketplace SaaS to integrate with e-commerce vendors will manage inventory and fulfilment while we'll play the shopper conversion function)

2.) Sponsored and hyper-personalized ads for food brands & retailers based on dietary needs

3.) insights & analytics for Food, Brands and Retailers

myWellaBee is a bootstrapped start up that is already revenue generating ($100,000 in ARR) in most recent financial year with plans to double this within the next 3-6 months.

We have a diverse range of customers: small, medium to large food brands and retailers.

We are also securing grants from reputable organizations like:

American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology:

Community Grant

Callaghan Innovation Grants since 2022 - present