Foodgroot: Your App for Food Rating and Personalized Grocery Shopping

Food quality is an increasingly discussed topic in Czech society because Czechs are becoming more interested in and aware about what they eat.

They could have been skeptical about certain foods entering their bodies, but they never knew for sure. And that was the biggest problem: there was no such database in which to find detailed information about most foods. Then came along Petr Václavek and his latest, innovative application— Foodgroot.

Foodgroot has become the gateway in helping customers figure out from a wide range of products what is exactly in them. The app is able to learn your habits and help you choose according to what foods you just want or needs to eat, and while shopping at a store it then immediately recommends which foods are suitable for you.

Moreover, it determines the overall quality, origin(s) of the food, and their impact on the environment or effect on your health. In the app, you scan the bar code of the selected food which then runs the information about its quality, origin, or environmental impact. All in maximum detail. The app rates products on over 70 parameters.

Photo: Foodgroot

“What Google did to the internet, we’re doing for the food market,” Václavek said about Foodgroot in an interview with Brian Kenety in November 2018. “Food is a basic, essential part of our lives, and we should know [what’s in it].”

Václavek and his team worked on the platform for months, testing it with several hundred users this year and is now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel from launching Foodgroot among the users. Tomáš Čupr and his biggest Czech online supermarket, Rohlik.cz, has become partner with future development.

“From the outset, our goal was to find a strong strategic partner, because integrating our solution into online platforms is an essential tool for the rapid growth of our platform. In parallel, of course, we are also preparing a stand-alone application covering the whole market,” said the Foodgroot founder.

Tomáš Čupr and his online grocery store will use the Czech application for comparison of food quality in his shop. The integration of Foodgroot into Rohlík will take place in the coming weeks or months.

Power of smart purchasing

Foodgroot is a free app and knowing this brings in the question of how Václavek will make a profit. Václavek stated he is not too worried, for he plans to install in-app purchases on the app, where users and customers alike can buy their (healthy) goods and needs right from there. He also wishes to extend this new food app to the EU nations. This is a smart way to bring in profit and benefit from his own business, as well as the app be beneficial to Czech society. For the time being, however, Václavek will let Foodgroot flourish into the large platform it is soon yet to become.