Jonathan Wolf, Co-Founder & CEO at ZOE: Leading The Gut Health Revolution

Tell us about ZOE

 

We are a nutrition science company that’s leading the gut health revolution. Our app uses AI and the world’s largest database of over 300,000 individual gut DNA and health profiles to deliver personalised nutrition advice to our users.

Today, we help over 3 million people each month to improve their health. We now know that the food we eat is the most important thing that shapes our health. And the trillions of microbes in our gut are central to every aspect of our health. ZOE has been proven in clinical trials, and can improve how you feel in weeks, and put you on track for many more healthy years.

 

 

Why did you feel that the UK needed a company like ZOE?

 

Our food system is broken. Big food writes the rules. And it’s making us sick. If we want to fix things, we have to do it ourselves. It turns out that food marketing and front-of-pack labels intentionally mislead, and company lobbyists influence government policy.

Yet we now know that most chronic diseases could be prevented through diet. And that whatever age you are, smarter food choices could give you many more healthy years. Just as exciting – those same dietary changes can give you more energy and better sleep in weeks.

With ZOE, we use cutting-edge science and AI to give people personalised insights into their own bodies. It’s not about exclusion, it’s about simple daily actions to eat foods that support your gut health, that we now know can dramatically improve your energy, sleep, and long-term health. And we have completed the clinical trials that prove ZOE works.

 

 

Tell us about the new app launch and how it differs from your previous product

 

Our new app is designed to deliver personalised health insights from day one, and helps you build healthy eating habits that stick.

The biggest revolution is our proprietary AI food tracking tool, so you can understand the health of your food with a quick photo. It’s absolutely magical. Snap a photo and in seconds you discover exactly what’s really in your meal – and how it will impact your health. Then you can chat with our interactive AI coach, Ziggie, to understand what you can change to make an immediate positive impact on your health.

It also includes a brand new feature, ZOE’s Processed Food Risk Scale, based on all our years of nutrition research, to identify the risks of the processed foods in your fridge. It turns out that many processed foods have a negative impact on our health, but not all processed foods are bad, and many are hidden behind smart marketing by Big Food. Our app cuts through the noise and can tell you if that yogurt is high risk, or no risk at all.

From day one, you can get personalised nutrition guidance, powered by the same world-leading science that sets ZOE apart. And we’ve placed the focus firmly on what really matters for long-term health, helping people to build healthy habits they can stick to for life. It focuses on education and, more importantly, action – thanks to that AI coach, Ziggie, who supports real-time choices, weekly planning, and the kind of rewards and small habits that actually stick.

For those who want the deepest possible personalisation, we have a new at-home gut health test kit. We run the world’s largest microbiome research study, and as a result can bring a series of breakthrough results to our customers. We have started to understand how microbes fit together as an ecosystem – we’ve identified specific gut clusters that are involved in inflammation, blood sugar control, body fat distribution and more. This means we can deliver quantitative insights into how healthy your gut health is today – and then offer specific advice on how to improve that ecosystem further.

Together, the new app and the new gut health test create something we’ve been working toward from the start: a scalable way to bring personalised nutrition to millions.

 

What has been the most challenging part of growing the company?

 

The hardest part has been turning complex nutrition science into something people can actually use every day and proving that it works. For the first three years we were just a huge science project – carrying out what has become the world’s largest nutrition science study. The scientists I work with naturally insist that everything we do is to the highest standards of scientific rigour – so we have published over 75 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and multiple randomised clinical trials. But then we have to combine this with world-leading data science, AI, behavioural science and world class software engineering.

What we’ve learned is that the real challenge isn’t solving the scientific challenge of what to eat to improve your health – it’s giving people the behavioural support to actually make those changes. As a result, mindful eating is at the centre of our new app – creating the habit of pausing at the point of eating, taking a photo of your meal so that you can start the process of discovering what you are really eating and understand how you can make simple changes that will rapidly transform how you feel. That’s why we’ve built this new app – and we’ve been able to do that thanks to our teams experience in nutrition science and huge advances in AI.

 

What can we hope to see from ZOE in the future?

 

We are still at the beginning of the gut health revolution. The next chapter is about pushing back against the mistruths and confusion caused by Big Food, so that we can really progress our mission to improve the health of millions. While at the same time continuing to push forward the science behind ZOE’s app. Our database has just passed 300,000 individual gut DNA profiles, and with this new app and test we are targeting one million mapped microbiomes. Expanding to one million will allow our AI to uncover more secrets from our microbiome. And allow ZOE scientists to understand how individual microbes are linked with sleep, inflammation, hunger, and brain health – so people can make smarter, more personalised lifestyle choices.

As the dataset grows, you can expect more frequent model refreshes, better recognition of global cuisines and global health trends, and sharper guidance on what to eat next, with no testing needed to get started. The same momentum will power further innovations in Daily30+.