Exclusive Interview with Puneet Manchanda, Founder, Smart Diet Planner

The health and wellness industry in India and around the world has undergone massive digitization to assist individuals in their nutritional as well as fitness journey through emerging technologies. Smart Diet Planner is a HealthTech platform that is built using the power of Artificial Intelligence. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Puneet Manchanda, founder of Smart Diet Planner.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Smart Diet Planner is a HealthTech platform that is built using the power of Artificial Intelligence that creates, tracks, and recommends nutritional requirements of individuals in a personalized fashion to combat obesity & other lifestyle disorders such as Diabetes, PCOS, Thyroid, Hypertension, and Cholesterol. It also provides personalized diet recommendations using AI to fitness enthusiasts who are focussed on bodybuilding.

Smart Diet Planner has been developed to democratize millions of users in their nutritional journey smartly through AI technology. Built with AI, the app takes care of three important aspects of diet recommendations such as "What to eat", "How much to eat" and "When to eat." It gives personalized guidance to users regarding 'what to eat based on nutritional requirements, evaluating each food item as healthy or not using algorithms, and assigning Nutri score along with the user's lifestyle and medical condition. 'How much to eat as per the total calories advised, and 'when to eat' aligning with the circadian rhythm, all regulated through the power of AI. It is also powered by 6 smart health trackers and is integrated with Google Fit for Android and Health kit for Apple.

The Smart Diet Planner app is available in India as well as the USA, Australia, and Canada. Till now, the app has recorded more than 360,000 downloads with more than 600 downloads daily.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

The genesis of venturing into the idea of starting Smart Diet Planner was a result of my journey of weight loss and reversing of a lifestyle disease that was possible only through the help of the right nutrition and diet control. The impact of having the right nutrition, left me intrigued and fascinated, which allowed me to build and scale my business – combining the power of advanced technology like AI with nutrition. We also wanted to address another key challenge which was the costly consultation of the dietitians. The objective for us has been to democratize millions in their nutritional journey to help them combat various lifestyle disorders smartly and cost-effectively.

3. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

 As a technology innovator and enthusiast, I have worked with IBM for more than 16 years in my previous stint and had delivered some of the most complex digital transformational projects for IBM. As a firm believer in accelerating businesses through advanced and emerging technologies, I've also headed the delivery of the comprehensive digital platform – YONO, for the country's largest public-sector bank, The State Bank of India (SBI). Which is now worth more than 40Bn dollars. However, everything changed for me as a personal journey of weight loss and reversal of hypertension and Cholesterol issues were contained through the help of the right nutrition. This left me amazed about the power of the right nutrition. Combining the power of Nutrition with his experience in advanced Digital technologies led to the idea of exploring and commencing the "Smart Diet Planner".

As a founder of the company, I conceptualize, create backend system designs and look after digitizing end-to-end solutions including knowledge of the dietician, UI & UX of the app. Constantly ideating about new features finding the right designers and onboarding new collaborations are some of the key decisions that define my role at Smart Diet Planner.

4. Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

We are a HealthTech startup that is bringing together the power of advanced technology like Artificial Intelligence and nutrition in countering the growing problem of obesity and other lifestyle disorders in India and globally through personalized diet and lifestyle recommendations.

The reason for some of the serious diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and obesity have risen are a result of unhealthy food choices and sedentary lifestyles.

Making use of our cutting-edge AI technology, we prioritize and recommend the best nutrition guidance to meet three important aspects of diet recommendations for our users, namely – "What to eat", "How much to eat" and "When to eat."

We have been able to achieve our targets of increasing our user base within three months of operations and positively impacting weight reduction or reverse lifestyle disorders for many with Smart Diet Planner. We have been able to achieve this cost-effectively for our customers and they have been able to adapt the diet which they can follow and easily conform to for a lifetime.

5. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Creating diet recommendations in a personalized fashion for an individual requires a good amount of planning by any Dietician. However, through our cutting-edge technology, we do all this in an automated way using artificial intelligence. Diet recommendations generated this way are extremely cost-effective and are result-oriented as have the brains of the best dieticians.

We have designed the app as a Diet planner wherein AI creates a daily diet plan, personalized for a user along with a good amount of personalized options with which a user can update their diet plans as per their convenience and choice. Globally this capability to create personalized diet recommendations is only with HealthifyMe. Our key differentiation from HealthifyMe is that we have provided a diet planner to the users besides the diet recommendations so that a user can further customize his/her diet plan. And we have exposed our Diet planner APIs which shall be used by Insurance companies/fitness companies and other Health techs for better tracking. We already have one insurance company and one diagnostic company, confirming the integration of these APIs.

6. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

According to the findings from a study published by The Brookings Institution, India is amongst the top 10 countries in the world of AI adopters and is poised to grow sharply by the end of 2025. The inclusion of AI in the nutritional and wellness sector has proved to be a fruitful partnership.

We are committed to growing with a clear and focused approach in 2022. Our focus has been on pivoting and scaling our operations in India as well as globally. We are looking at growing our user base by 200 percent by the end of this year.  And we are expecting at least 4 large tie-ups where our Diet planner APIs shall be used. In our road plan, we are going to be adding gamification and will be onboarding the corporates. We also see a requirement and our capability to do lifestyle disorder reversals as well.

99% of fitness companies have a focus on the workout while we are focussed on Nutrition which is much more impactful (It is said,  80% is diet and 20% is a workout for good health.)

We are committed to being the #1 company globally in "personalized Nutrition recommendations via AI".

7. AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

With the increased penetration of smartphones and internet connections, there lies a unique opportunity for innovation and scalability of AI penetration across industries for the people of India. A December 2021 report by McKinsey Analytics on the state of AI in 2021 found that India was the leading adopter of AI among emerging economies, from a business as well as commercial standpoint. Our platform is built with the help of Artificial Intelligence, wherein the app takes care of three important aspects of diet recommendations such as "What to eat", "How much to eat" and "When to eat." It gives personalized guidance to users regarding 'what to eat based on nutritional requirements, the user's lifestyle, and medical condition. 'How much to eat as per the total calories advised, and 'when to eat' aligning with the circadian rhythm, all regulated through the power of AI and algorithms.

We are using AI to categorize all the similar users present in our application and our recommendation engine predicts the food item a user is likely to have based on food & user similarity data points. These data points are increasing day by day and our recommendation engine is getting better day by day

Just like how the internet changed how humans interact and adapt to technological innovations, AI will have the same level of impact if not more.

8. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Our edge over other players in the industry is that we have a really strong tech-based nutrition product. Our app is not just like a static diet plan. It helps in diet planning like a 24×7 dietician. You also have a lot of healthy options to choose from which are personalized for you and as you keep updating the diet plan, Smart Diet Planner will keep guiding you to make required personalized changes.

Another capability that gives us an edge is that we are integrating with multiple companies as part of a B2B offering in which we expose the Diet Plan APIs to insurance companies, diagnostic companies, fitness apps & companies, etc. The possibilities are huge and for us the edge to take our product to a highly scalable level without significantly increasing the burning cost as it's an advanced digitized product. Another important difference is that our app's registration journey and onboarding are available on WhatsApp, once that is done you can be easily redirected to the progressive web app as a mobile website where you can access all the smart diet planner capabilities without even downloading the app.