AI-enhanced personalized nutrition: Verdify’s Noory platform customizes food intake for dietary goals

04 Sep 2023 --- A new digital nutrition guide tailors daily meals to a person’s individual preferences and dietary requirements, specifically designed for people with weight management goals, food allergies and digestive issues. Foodtech start-up Verdify, says consumers can join the free platform – dubbed Noory – online, where they create a personal profile. 

The platform assesses nutritional needs, optimizes food intake, creates personalized meal plans and helps to monitor progress. Verdify notes that it can also complement the advice of dietitians, as these often have limited capacity to create extensive meal plans for each patient. 

“Verdify’s mission is enabling people to make better food choices for personal and planetary health. With Noory, Verdify aims to create meaningful impact by empowering people to cook healthy meals aligned with personal health needs, regardless of dietary challenges,” Fleur Pasman, the company’s chief operations officer, tells Nutrition Insight. 

Verdify aims to provide adequate support to people with personal dietary challenges, enabling them to control their health and well-being better. 

Overcoming healthy eating challenges 
Noory optimizes recipes through ingredient exchanges and considers nutrition values and taste alignment to ensure that individuals with complex dietary challenges can still enjoy a diverse and varied range of meals. 

“Eating healthy might seem an easy and straightforward lifestyle to adopt, but it’s not always the case,” says Alessia Carrafiello, product and operations manager at Verdify. 

The digital nutrition guide generates meal plans that are checked and optimized to suit individual needs.“What’s healthy for you might not be healthy for somebody else due to food allergies, intolerances, health conditions or different lifestyles. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work.”

Carrafiello explains that people may get frustrated by having to search for long periods to find what they are looking for, information that is not detailed, prominent privacy and security risks and expensive products and services. 

“People end up struggling with being able to avoid allergies effectively,” she continues, “finding suitable recipes they like, replacements that often do not taste as good, limited availability due to their dietary restriction(s) and more. Noory aims to address all these challenges as a personal nutrition guide.”

Recently, researchers from the American Society for Nutrition suggested extending personalized nutrition by creating adaptive nutrition advice systems customized to individual needs in real-life environments. 

Personalized meal plans 
Users can choose among five nutrition goals: managing food allergies and intolerances, improving gut health, weight management, living a healthier lifestyle or a more sustainable lifestyle. 

“Unlike traditional meal planning solutions that don’t cater to specific dietary needs, Noory will generate meal plans that are carefully checked and optimized to suit someone’s needs at no cost,” explains Carrafiello. 

“Combining the expertise of our nutrition team, national dietary guidelines and AI, Noory takes into account over 15 personal parameters to optimize recipes by automatically swapping ingredients in and out. This makes Noory a great solution for people with specific dietary needs.” 

Noory uses Verdify’s Swapmeals recipe platform, mapping recipes online and tailoring these to consumer nutrition profiles. 

AI in personal nutrition 
Noory calculates the nutritional needs of each user through AI to present recipes that align with personal goals and preferences. Verdify notes that the platform adheres to medical best practices and employs strict data security policies. 

Rutger Kramer, Verdify’s chief technology officer, tells us that Noory’s development is mainly based on the expertise of the company’s nutrition team. 

“We’ve restructured and codified their knowledge of how individuals can benefit from the right nutrients and built an expert system that can assess and improve the composition of their meals by suggesting alternative ingredients.” 

Noory calculates the nutritional needs of each user through AI to meet their health goals.“We’re combining this with several AI techniques such as Natural Language Processing algorithms to identify ingredients in a recipe, and generative models such as GPT to rewrite recipe texts.”

Kramer expects AI to be an essential catalyst for personal nutrition but underscores the importance of expert systems to check and correct what AI suggests to apply tech within the nutrition domain safely. 

Biotech company Nuritas also warns that AI needs scientific rigor and input to validate it. The company uses AI to speed up ingredient discovery, which is tested in clinical trials. 

What’s next? 
The service will be expanded to support people with breast cancer, obesity and other specific medical conditions. 

“Next up is connecting Noory with the healthcare environment,” shares Pasman. 

“For dietitians and other healthcare professionals, we have developed NooryMed as a state-of-the-art application for remote nutrition management. NooryMed will soon be tested in a clinical setting with oncology patients to expand it to other therapeutic areas.” 

In the future, healthcare professionals can use NooryMed to offer personalized meal plans and monitor patients’ progress. 

By Jolanda van Hal