What would you pay to see if what you're eating is actually healthy?
Welcome to the first post of "What's Guud and What's Bahhd 🐑 withgu.dev" where I search the world wide web for new tech that can be used in your life and rate it across 3 categories:
- Usefulness —how practical it is for you to use right now
- Cost —know the upfront price and any hidden fees for using the product
- Longevity —my opinion on if this product is here to stay or will eventually fade away over time
This post is not sponsored and I am not affiliated with "pom" in any way.
Introducing "pom":
As mentioned in the short description, "pom" helps you scan your food labels, so you know if what you're eating is actually healthy or not. More information can be found on their site: https://thepom.app/
I went ahead and downloaded the app, logged in with my gmail account, and started scanning a few labels.
After scanning a product, the ingredients list will appear as well as any "flags" that mark the ingredients as potentially harmful.
These are the three categories that "pom" currently has as flags:
And the "apple flavour" in my apple soda appeared like this:
Overall the app is very barebones as this is all it does, although I like that they include studies for certain ingredients to provide support for whether they are potentially harmful or not.
Usefulness: 3/5
Potentially harmful ingredients are always useful to know about, but if you're really concerned about your health it's probably more efficient to simply learn the core ingredients that should be avoided for sure and read the label yourself. I also wonder how often warnings will actually dissuade people from buying the ingredients / products they already use on a day to day basis.
One small issue is that when using the app, scanning a longer ingredient list can sometimes take up to 30 seconds to process. While this isn't a long time in the grand scheme of things, I imagine it might be awkward if you're taking a 30 second break to look at a product label along with your phone while shopping in a grocery store. Make sure to avoid eye contact with strangers while doing so.
Cost: 5/5
Well it's completely free for now, so there's not much to complain about in terms of cost, but it does make me wonder how they plan to monetize and keep their product alive, but I'll talk about that in the next section.
Longevity: 2/5
I almost want to give it a 1/5 because health / nutrition based app do crowd the market quite a bit and tend to be short-lived as people default to their normal habits in what they consume and purchase. On the other hand, the UI and experience is well-tuned and each step is pretty frictionless which gives the team at "pom" a great foundation for expanding and adding more features or building out their core features more.
I want to believe this will be an app that can withstand the test of time, but I also find it hard to see anyone paying a monthly subscription to simply scan labels and be told what products may be harmful to them when a google search on the product itself will probably surface the same if not more information.
Expanding their product to focus on providing alternatives and recommendations in lieu of the product label that was scanned may be an interesting direction to go in that provides more value akin to what a nutritionist could do and therefore warrant paying for. I imagine like a real nutritionist the app could take some personal details about your health to provide more curated recommendations.
Still, that direction may take a lot more groundwork and time to develop, which makes me think ads will be the most likely way to monetize in the near-term, but that requires a large user base to make work, and while everyone may sometimes wonder and worry about what they are eating, it's likely not a consistent thing everyone will do weekly or monthly.
"pom" meaning "peace of mind" has a great initial app that makes it easy to scan and see if what you're using is healthy or not. For anyone that wants to satisfy their curiosity on what is actually in your food or product, "pom" is a great addition to their phone to satisfy that itch, but for anyone else interested in health / nutrition, I would wait to see if (and when) new features might be added to make their product offering more robust.
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