RIQ

Inspiration

America spends $4.2 trillion a year on healthcare. A significant fraction of that cost traces back to what people eat, or cannot eat. Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and diet related heart disease do not strike randomly. They follow ZIP codes.

In Anacostia, DC, ZIP 20020, 16.2% of adults have diagnosed diabetes, which is nearly triple the rate of nearby Arlington, VA, at 5.8%. The nearest supermarket is 2.1 miles away. Thirty six percent of households rely on SNAP. These are not statistics we made up. They come directly from DC Health neighborhood profiles, the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, and the US Census Bureau.

We asked why every nutrition app treats all of these neighborhoods the same.

Why does a SNAP recipient in Anacostia get the same generic advice to eat more vegetables as a high income professional in Georgetown? Why do WIC enrolled pregnant women get recipe recommendations that ignore their WIC food packages? Why does a Salvadoran family in Columbia Heights get told to replace pupusas with quinoa bowls, only to quietly stop using the app?

The technology to fix this exists. The federal data to fix this is public. It just had never been assembled into a product that truly respects who the user is, including their culture, budget, language, medical reality, and neighborhood food access constraints.

That is why we built ReplateIQ.

Built With

• gemini
• google-authentication