How Digital Tools Are Shaping Nutrition Industry

Jeanne Petrucci, MS, RDN, is the founder of Living Plate RX, a platform that provides practitioners and digital health companies with tech-powered meal planning tools and evidence-based nutrition content. With over 30 years of experience as a culinary instructor and a Master's degree in Nutrition Education from Columbia University, Jeanne combines her passion for food and health to create nutrition solutions that drive positive health outcomes.

Could you share your origin story and how your experiences as a practitioner have shaped your work today?

I spent 30 years as a culinary instructor. 30 years in my local community, teaching people how to eat healthy foods. I've always had an interest in food as it impacts our health. I found myself naturally gravitating to the healthcare space. So, I would conduct cooking demonstrations on-site, in hospitals, doctors' offices, and in nonprofits to support people touched by various chronic diseases. And in that 30-year span, it became very clear to me that if I wanted to help them on a deeper level, I would have to go back to school and become a registered dietitian. Registered dietitians are uniquely qualified to translate evidence-based research into actionable steps that people can take to manage various health conditions. I went back to school and earned my R&D credential with the hopes of opening up a private practice. My goal was really to incorporate culinary instruction into nutrition care. It became very clear to me early on in my practice that there was a lack of tools available to dieticians like me who were focused on food as medicine principles in nutrition care. And so I started searching for tools to help me, such as meal planning software and evidence-based curricula, as well as simple resources like handouts. Nothing existed that served my patients the way that I wanted to serve them. So, I decided to start creating these resources on my own. On the meal planning side, I had thousands of recipes, but I didn't have the software to deliver them to my patients how I wanted to. It occurred to me that there was probably a community of practitioners like myself who wanted to serve people with integrity but couldn't because they lacked the necessary resources. And that's where it all began.

What key challenges did you face as a registered dietitian that led you to create Living Plate Rx, and could you tell us a bit more about it?

The main problem was meal planning. And it's so interesting because we've been in the market for four years as a profitable service for registered dietitians. It was COVID that was pivotal for us. Meal planning is a huge pain point for registered dietitians, nutrition professionals, and health care professionals in general because every consumer and patient comes to the counseling room wanting a meal plan. People think that meal plans will solve their problems. That's what we're told. Well, they don't solve the problem. One. And number two, nobody follows the meal plan. And really, what the meal plan is intended to be is a space for the practitioner and the consumer to have a conversation about food and set goals around culinary behaviors, kitchen behaviors, and food. It is not meant to be a mandate. When we first started offering this, most practitioners came to us for meal plans. If you asked my community now about their experience with Living Plate, they would say they came for the meal plans but stayed for the content. The content is that valuable piece that builds out the intervention.

The principle for my meal planner is that it is food-driven and human-enabled. So in our meal planners, you don't go in and plug in carb protein fat and say, okay, computer algorithm or okay AI, generate a meal plan for me. I guarantee you that that is going to be a lousy meal plan. I have yet to see a computer algorithm generate a suitable meal plan for a patient. And that's because it's lacking that human intervention. It's lacking the knowledge of who this patient is. What are their preferences? What do they like? What is their culture? What is their food access? Where are they on their health journey? That's all practitioner-driven information. We are now undergoing a complete overhaul of the meal planner with Sudolabs’ support in your team, which is really exciting. And so, our in-house tech team and your team are working nicely together to improve that experience further.

So that is the story of the meal planner and where Living Plate Rx started. But then, we naturally started building our library of content. So things like handouts, eBooks, cooking videos, and digital courses were all things that our community opted into the meal planning system, and that's what they wanted. They needed more support and more resources to build these dynamic interventions. Meal plans are great but are only a small part of an overall dietary intervention. So that's when we expanded just before COVID. So, in 2019, we started offering a library of products on a third-party LMS. It worked for a while, but then we decided we needed to build our own. And that's when we came to you.

How do you approach user acquisition, including the role of partnerships, webinars, events, and community-building?

Let's just be clear that almost always, even if it is a well-commercialized software company, it's the registered dietitian who reaches out to us. But the way that I reach these dietitians is by being where they are. That can be anything from The Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo, the biggest nutrition conference for registered dietitians every year, with 8,000 to 10,000 showing up there. So we're there. We have a booth. We're visible, letting people know who we are. We also attend another key conference, Today's Dietitian, in May. That conference is smaller but super targeted. Many entrepreneurial RDs attend there. So, we are attending these two conferences, and most recently, two digital healthcare conferences, Health and Vive. And then also showing up as a speaker. I think that this idea of thought leadership plays a huge role in my business. I like to talk about what I do. I'm passionate about incorporating culinary instruction into nutrition care. It took me getting out on social media twice a week, every week, for a year and a half. I did cooking demos, and it was mostly to reach out to my community, but we had many consumers joining me, too. I was able to elevate myself as a thought leader in that space. So I could create the materials to support my community there.

Social media doesn't play a huge part in the growth of my business, but it's a place where I communicate with my community. I deliver huge value and give so much away for free on social media and through my free webinars. And I think people just really appreciate that. And I'm also very transparent as well about what we do.

It's very much not canned. It's just me showing up and saying, I can help you. Here's some free content. If it resonates with you, get on a call with me. And that's kind of how the conversation starts. You have to nurture people. So I would say really just reflect on the know, like, and trust. And that's where the thought leadership comes from.

Would you say your social media efforts focus on building trust and awareness, leading customers to buy later, even if they don't convert directly through your content?

Exactly. I mean, certainly, our corporate or enterprise partners will not just buy based on a social media post, but they can get to know, like, and trust me. It's a very top-of-the-funnel activity. You can engage in it as much or as little as you want. It is a way for them to get into my funnel so that I can eventually nurture them into a paying client. And then retain them. You didn't ask me about retention, but that speaks volumes about the health of a business. Our retention is 3.2 % right now. When practitioners and companies come to us, we over-deliver on value. And so they stay.

But it definitely takes time. That's the time-money thing that doesn't translate well. There are a lot of things you can exchange money for time. Thought leadership is not one of them. You get that by showing up and, you know, showing up where people are. My community tends to be on social media, so I need to show up. I'm not terribly active, but I am active enough that I found a nice balance there.

How do you engage with your current community members to maintain this strong retention and keep your brand on top of mind?

Your software is really helping us with that right now. Communicating and reaching our community is much easier now because we can do that within the platform. But number one would be listening, listening, and responding. You need to create a process through which your members can give you feedback. This is working, but this isn't working. Can you fix this? And how you respond to that speaks volumes about how you serve your clients. And we're very responsive. I tend to be more reactive than my director of operations wants me to be. But just being responsive and listening, being authentic, and saying, I make mistakes too, like I'm not perfect, our team is not perfect, but we're here to deliver the best experience possible for you. But you need to have the technology in place to deliver that. Working with your team has enabled us to elevate our responsiveness and customer service, as they can communicate with us through various posts within Living Plate RX. And there are a lot of ways that they can communicate with us as well.

Social proof is important, too. When somebody calls me for a testimonial about Sudolabs, I'll take that call immediately. I'm a super fan of your team, and that means a lot. The same happens with our community as well, especially on the corporate and enterprise side, because they all talk to each other; they're all in the same circles where I might not be in the room, but somebody who has worked with me is in the room, and they can say, you need to speak to Living Plate RX. That helps establish social proof and goes back to gaining people's trust and letting them know that you're there to support them and be helpful.

What are your thoughts on AI tools for content creation and meal planning? Do you see them as a potential threat to your product or as an opportunity for optimization and added value?

Yeah, definitely the latter. If anybody believes that AI will ruin their business, they're delusional. Absolutely not.

AI alone, speaking for Living Plate RX, will not impact our business in terms of competition because people who rely on AI are not our competition. We are a human-enabled platform. But AI within Living Plate RX as a tool serves so many purposes. It helps us save time by summarizing content and repurposing content, which helps us accelerate our content creation process. We're evidence-based practitioners and do everything, including our meal plans and recipes. They need a human eye; they need a human touch. We do not generate AI images for our meal planner. It needs to be realistic. But AI can definitely serve a purpose in terms of helping us generate grocery lists. So there are many ways we're using it right now to support ourselves. But it's mostly to repurpose, reimagine, and get the creative juices flowing, not create original content or meal plans.

Have these handpicked highlights sparked your curiosity? You won't want to miss the full conversation with Jeanne Petrucci on our YouTube channel or your favorite platform. The episode dropped on September 24th, 2024.