App to improve workplace nutrition
A growing number of companies are offe ring their employees digital tools to help improve their eating habits in hopes of increasing productivity , reducing sick days and cutting healthcare costs.
Zipongo, a small digital start-up, helps employees navigate a company’s cafeteria menu to find choices that best meet a set of preferences and health goals set by the wor kers themselves. On average, Zipongo charges employers a little more than $50 a year per employee for a complete set of its services.
Since its debut in 2011, Zipongo has connected with some 125 companies. While Google was an early adopter a few years ago, IBM was among the most recent and began offering Zipongo to its 10,000 employees in January .
Users plug in their food preferences -spicy , glutenfree, protein-rich -and, if they want, biometric data like cholesterol and blood pressure levels. Zipongo then creates a menu from the choices in Google’s cafeteria. Google employees using Zipongo ate more fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, calcium, fish and fiber-rich foods. Google also saw a dip in red meat consumption among its Zipongo users, which was one of its goals.
Like other companies, IBM has long worked to steer its employees to healthier eating, even using a “traffic light“ system to indicate which cafeteria foods might be good choices. In 2007, the company offered a $150 cash rebate for IBM families recor ding their healthier eating habits in a confidential online system for eight weeks.
“We strongly believe eating healthy is a social endeavor, both at work and at home,“ said Dr. Kyu Rhee, chief health officer at IBM. “It makes no sense if you eat healthy at the office and then eat badly at home.“
The so-called “wellness“ companies are now benefiting from a provision in the federal health care law that requires insurers to cover obesity screenings and nutri tional counseling for many employees.
Zipongo has raised roughly $10 million in financing since its launch in 2011, including a $5 million investment by Excel Venture Management in late 2014, according to CrunchBase. It currently is raising more money .
However, Zipongo and other digital start-ups continue to raise concerns among health advocates as to whether these types of tools pose problems for protecting employee privacy.
