GUNDO
By Jillian Hamersma
Jean Pierre Lannou never ate fruit, so he decided to integrate orange juice into his diet. When he got his blood test results, nothing had changed. After doing further research, Jean Pierre learned that his orange juice was losing many of the positive properties from the original fruit because it’s oxidized, lower in fiber, and higher in sugar than the fruit from which it comes. Jean Pierre realized our misconceptions about nutrition and set out to do something about it.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with co-founders, Jean Pierre Lannou and Priscila Silva Delgado, last week to hear more about their mobile nutritionist app, GUNDO.
Vision
GUNDO is a nutritional assistant that focuses on providing analysis on customers’ grocery carts in real time while shopping online. It is a mobile app that facilitates food purchase decision-making for people that want to improve their health by providing a nutritional score based on macro and micronutrients. The app is integrated with the grocery store using API and gives product recommendations on how to improve the shopping basket. The product recommendations can then also be compared by price to similar products. Rather than informing past decisions, GUNDO aims to change behavior when it matters most – at the time of purchase.
Market and Revenue Structure
The initial market is anyone purchasing their groceries online in Spain and Latin America. Secondary markets include France, and tertiary markets are the UK, USA, and Germany. Due to COVID and customer preference trends, the online grocery market will see 15-20% growth year over year till the next 10 years at least. Planeta Huerto, GUNDO’s first partnership, is 100% online. Online food purchases in Europe were EUR 57 billion in 2020, with Spain accounting for EUR 2 billion of those sales. The US online grocery market was EUR 84 billion for the same period. Revenue will initially be earned on a B2B basis with a commission charged for each order placed through Gundo. The app itself will operate on a freemium model with the free version as part of the initial rollout and the paid version to be added later. Later revenue streams will include promotional spend from brands who wish to prioritize their health foods and monetization of anonymous, behavioral community data for scientific use.
Competition
Competitors include nutrition tracking tools like myfitnesspal and other apps that allow customers to consolidate supermarkets in one place to compare prices. GUNDO does both things and is Integrated directly in the customer’s shopping experience so they don’t need to enter anything directly into the app like other nutrition tracking tools. GUNDO also provides detailed analyses which are useful to people suffering from diabetes, hypertension and other diseases. GUNDO is also customizable for vegan and vegetarian diets along with personal goals fitting 14 different consumer profiles.
Timeline/Development
The team has raised EUR 100,000 from family, friends, and an investor in order to build out the technology. GUNDO is pre-revenue but has completed a prototype and validations with the client. The team of developers has been developing the app since October 2021 and aims to complete development at the end of January 2022. The team wants to open a new round of fundraising in March 2022 to raise EUR 500,000 for marketing and further app development. Later versions of the app will include recipes and opportunities to upload blood and gut test results for a more catered approach. The first country to launch will be Spain in conjunction with the largest online organic food retailer, Planeta Huerto (of Carrefour). Given language similarities, they plan to roll out the app in Mexico and Chile next.
Team
The leadership team consists of 4 people: 2 cofounders, one nutritionist, and one developer (CTO) who leads a team of developers working on front-end and back-end. Co-founders Priscila Silva Delgado and Jean Pierre Lannou met at IE Business School in Madrid while pursuing their MBAs. They brainstormed the idea during a 6-week start-up lab. They then participated in the IE incubator program and continued together in the Venture Lab class.
Priscila studied as an Industrial Engineer but has 9 years of work experience in marketing for consumer goods in Latin America. She was Head of Brands and worked to launch 5 different food products while focusing on sales objectives, negotiation, and analytics. Jean Pierre studied Business Administration and worked for a not-for-profit in Argentina, France, and South Africa. He was President of the Organization in France and then Head of Projects in South Africa. Jean Pierre has experience leading transformation, teams, and launching new products and services for his clients. The two are always seeking to learn and contact people that can share knowledge. They have recruited a CTO and a certified nutritionist in order to fill knowledge gaps.
Want to explore GUNDO yourself?
Visit their website: https://gundo.app/
or their blog: https://www.gundo.app/blog/
and ask your favorite supermarket about a partnership!
Want to get involved as an advisor, or investor?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gundo/
Instagram: @gundo.app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gundomundo