Ravi Teja Putrevu first started paying attention to food labels after being diagnosed with a rare disease called acromegaly. This inspired him and his co-founders to create ‘TruthIn’, an app that lets you scan a bar code to access a product’s nutritional details in seconds.
Dr Aman Basheer Sheikh, a dental surgeon who had been living in China prior to COVID-19, noticed a stark difference in the clarity of food labelling systems between India and other countries. “Many claims are misleading,” he says. This gap drove him to co-create TruthIn.
Ravi and Dr Aman then connected with Raghav Putrevu, a tech expert who had been working in the industry for 18 years. Together, the trio combined their expertise in technology and health to develop an app that helps people make better dietary choices.
What started as an idea in 2020 became TruthIn by 2022. While developing the app, they consulted nutrition experts, including officials from the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
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TruthIn’s algorithm assesses food products by their nutritional profile, ingredients, and manufacturing process. “We looked at established rating systems for packaged foods, such as the NutriScore in Europe and the Health Star Rating in Australia,” Ravi says.
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The app’s TruthIn Rating system assigns the health impact of food products. Products are assigned health ratings on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the healthiest option. Users can also filter products by nutrients, lifestyle, and allergens to match their dietary needs and preferences.
“Labels and tags are often complex and misleading. We want consumers to quickly identify any potential health risks and understand a product’s nutritional profile,” Ravi emphasises.
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With a subscription, users can also get personalised dietary insights through the MatchMeter feature, which considers age, gender, health conditions, and more to give tailored recommendations.
The team initially hoped to source data from existing databases, but soon discovered a lack of centralised repositories for product information in India. “We found that information on the internet was often inaccurate or outdated,” Ravi says. They needed a ground-up approach.
So, they decided to send photographers to supermarkets to capture product images and labels directly. “We only rely on internet data for about 20% of our information,” Ravi clarifies. Their mission is clear, as Ravi puts it, “We aim to bring transparency to consumers.”
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TruthIn hopes to address health concerns like unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, tobacco and alcohol use, and air pollution — key contributors to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes, and chronic respiratory conditions.
The TruthIn team consists of 35 members, including 15 nutritionists and doctors, working alongside tech professionals. The initiative is entirely bootstrapped and self-funded. Currently,the app has an active user base of approximately 85,000 to 1,00,000 users each month.
The startup is committed to empowering consumers with better food choices. “The problem is that people don’t know what’s in their food. Our mission is to educate and empower consumers,” Dr Aman shares.