Angela Malik and Pav Kalsi, CEO and Clinical Director and co-founders of Planet Nourish.

Good to see you both. So –

Can you tell me about Planet Nourish?

Fundamentally, we’re a team passionate about equitable healthcare for all.

Planet Nourish is an ethnically focused prevention as a service (PaaS) digital platform that helps to manage diet-related health conditions by providing dietary and behavioural support – created based on lived experience.

Throughout our working careers, we’ve seen the health outcomes related to diet within ethnic populations, such as south asian and black african caribbean communities, where these communities are disproportionately affected by and increased risk of diet-related conditions such as Type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity.

As a team we have seen the impact of Type 2 diabetes on our families – and this is the ‘glue’ that holds us together, we want to solve a problem related to diet that we have lived with and seen for generations.

We’ve looked at the diet and behaviour change digital programmes that are currently available and identified two big issues. Firstly, these typically address general populations and are not culturally-specific enough for certain populations. In addition, technology solutions have been created using data sets not representative of the non-white population and hence that in-built bias, compounded over decades, means these interventions just aren’t proving effective across different global populations.

So, due to this gap in provision of effective ethnicity-specific solutions for managing diet-related health conditions, and with our combined experience in nutrition, dietetics, data and design, Planet Nourish was born!

Our aim is to level the playing field and reduce health inequalities to improve better health outcomes in the long-term.

Who has Planet Nourish been created for?

In south asian populations, women are typically at the centre of the household influencing her immediate family across multiple generations and her wider community in terms of diet. We see an opportunity to empower women as change makers through education, support and community building.

Our research working with women in south asian populations has helped us define the key facilitators for health improvement and our Planet Nourish ‘3C’ methodology – Cooking, Coaching & Community.

So, our target users are very much women from south asian populations. In the future we want to use our 3C methodology for other communities who are disproportionately affected by diet-related conditions.

In terms of customers, we know we have a strong proposition for insurance providers, corporates and health providers to improve population health, enhance workforce wellbeing and respond to societal challenges.

Our USP is our capability to build platform solutions rooted in ethnicity-led data. And we can see multiple future applications and opportunities as we continue to build our unique ethnicity-based data set.

What would you say are your successes on your scale-up journey?

We’ve achieved so much over the last 2 years!

This year, the Planet Nourish team were winners of Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech 2022, and Top 5 in Artificial Intelligence 2022, and we were one of the first companies to be invited to join the DLA Piper Bespoke Accelerator Programme.

We’re so proud of what we’ve achieved with very little investment to date – we’ve built our MVP showing real, tangible results. After participation in our 12 week programmes, we’ve seen impressive clinical and non-clinical outcomes, such as an average 2% reduction in blood glucose levels, 5% body weight loss, improved confidence in making decisions around healthy eating, and improved mood and mental health. To date we have nearly 700 people on our database and nearly 300 people have downloaded our app.

We’ve built our community of ‘nourishers’ – working with them to co-design our programme and to understand how we keep them engaged over 12 weeks in the programme and map their journeys through that engagement and learning. We’re in a process of learning using our user-design methodology, iterating based on lived experience. Each interaction we have with our user community makes our technology more relevant to our user needs.

We’re actively seeing the benefit of personalisation of digital health viewed through an ethnicity lens – we’ve had testimonials from users saying “I’ve been on every health programme going but I have never seen myself reflected in any other programme.”

And we’ve had clinicians coming forward saying they want to be involved. It’s really positive to see that buy-in to what we are working to achieve.

What connections / partnerships are you seeking to make for the next stage of your business growth?

We are very much looking for partnerships with corporates, health insurance companies and the NHS – we know we can make a real positive impact on health in BAME communities and workplace wellbeing. Planet Nourish is offering a digitally delivered, ethnically focused personalised health solution for diet-related conditions, specifically for under-represented communities.

We believe that addressing health in the workplace with an ethnicity-specific lens will lead to better health outcomes and a happier, healthier workforce. With the platform, organisations can meet their Diversity and Inclusion initiatives by utilising our ethnic-specific approach to manage with more cultural competence.

We are seeking to work with Primary Care Networks (PCNs) and primary care partners in the NHS to co-design and deliver pilots for real-world evaluation with new communities across the UK.  We offer easily accessible, swift support for our users and have already shown improved clinical and non-clinical outcomes in those most at risk of diet-related conditions. Planet Nourish’s offer fits with the NHS Long term Plan to deliver joined up, tailored and community-based care.

We are currently fundraising, seeking pre-seed investment for our 12 month runway, and we are looking forward to the P4SY Showcase in November.

We’re also continuously building our Champion Nourisher networks, working with the populations we are seeking to support, so it would be wonderful to work with partners with established communication channels and networks to share the Planet Nourish opportunity.

And finally, can you tell us about your experience of participating in the P4SY Accelerator Programme?

The support from P4SY has been excellent in facilitating local connections into the NHS, business and academic partners. The team has been very proactive in making connections and supporting those connections so that as a start-up we don’t get overwhelmed.

It’s been excellent!

You can find out more through the Planet Nourish website, view demo films here, or contact Angela Malik-Agarwal, angela@planetnourish.com