FoodEssentials: What is in Your Food? Interview With CEO

Anton Xavier, the CEO of FoodEssentials was recently interviewed by Donna Davis on behalf of Associated Content. We thought it would be a great idea to post the interview so all could see, and invite all of our readers and subscribers to post any comments or questions they may have. If you feel as though you have a question that you would like our CEO to answer, then feel free to ask away. Look forward to reading your comments!

A New Website Bares All

The following is an interview with Anton Xavier, the director of a new website for product information and public awareness. It may just become the wave of the future in consumer information:

What is the purpose of your website?
The FoodEssentials tool (website) is designed to analyze thousands of American food labels for nutrients, additives and allergens. In turn, our users are able to make easy, informed food choices that suit their specific dietary needs – whether they suffer from intolerance, food allergies, or sensitivity to food additives and want to stay healthy. We designed the tool to save people from wasting time rummaging around supermarkets reading the backs of food labels. We wanted to do the work for them. Our process of analyze every individual ingredient gives our users the unique ability to easily identify foods that either they can’t eat or wish to avoid. As a result, we feel that our tool not only helps people avoid certain foods and ingredients, but it can also help them to expand their diet by highlighting acceptable foods that, otherwise, they wouldn’t have considered.

How can it help me to make better choices?
The FoodEssentials website will soon be rolling out its tools for retailers around the country. This means that you will be able to compare foods from the actual stores you regularly visit. This can therefore help you make better choices about your food as you will be able to effectively filter products for nutrient, additive or allergen properties that suit your specific dietary needs.
FoodEssentials makes no judgements and draws no opinions, but instead helps you to find the foods that suit yours and your family’s personal needs. For instance, you can find a list of cereals and compare them for preservatives, low sugar and high fibre and choose the best one before shopping.

What information will I receive from it?
FoodEssentials provides users with the ability to compare foods not only by nutrients, additives and allergens but also well known ingredients like MSG, aspartame and high fructose corn syrup. Simply search for the food category that you want and then select the variable you wish to compare from the drop down menu. The website will display the information for those products. You can also click on a product to view the food label to see the nutrients and ingredients displayed on the food label. In addition, the FoodEssentials label groups types of food ingredients together.

What procedure do I follow to get the information I want?
Navigate to www.foodessentials.com, type your chosen food category into the search field (white bread, peanut butter, soda pop etc) and what you care about (gluten, aspartame, calories, peanuts etc). We understand that most people are concerned about several variables and some of us are allergic or sensitive to more than one type of ingredient. Therefore, users are able to analyse their selected food category using any of the following: 9 standard nutrients; 6 types of food additives; 10 food allergens and 11 individual ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate or even controversial artificial colorants like yellow 5 & 6.

When analysing additives, allergens or specific ingredients, our traffic-light system will tell the user if the presence is listed (in red), presence is possible (in yellow) or if the presence is not listed (in green) making it easier to avoid certain foods. Nutrient values can also be sorted from high to low or low to high.

The actual food label can be viewed by clicking on the product title at any time. Doing so also displays the complete FoodEssentials ingredient analysis of that particular food.

What expectations do you have for the future of this site?
FoodEssentials aim is to become the standard tool for comparing foods nationwide, to be available on every retailer’s website, and hopefully, in the near future, to be available in the store. We want to provide transparency on food label data and are consequently working closely with different organizations that have an interest in this data. In the long run we believe a more transparent system can help to influence consumer behaviour as well as public policy towards food labelling, leading to a healthier and better informed population.

But in the short to medium term we expect FoodEssentials to slowly but steadily grow its reach and influence throughout the community.

What motivated you to create this site?
Interestingly enough, the motivation for the website came from a real need for it. My father came up with the original idea after his annual check up. He was given a multi-page report from his dietician with a multitude of rules and guidelines he must adhere to. My father, being the way he is, wanted a list of products (brands) that suited these guidelines. After looking on the internet for such a listing, he soon came to the realisation that nothing at the time really existed. After coming together, we did our research and soon realized the potential of such a tool to help so many.

What message do you want to spread?
Consider what you are eating. Be a little more aware about the food that you feed your family. Don’t always go by the “marketing” claims pasted on the front of packaging but delve into the food label and consider if a product is exactly what you are looking for or not. At least, if we can help people to become a little more aware of food labelling and what they are eating then our mission has been achieved. It’s really easy to make a few minor changes to the products you choose and make a significant impact on your and your family’s health.

What do you want readers of this article to come away with?
We would like readers to come away with an understanding of our company and mission. FoodEssentials has launched a tool that is designed to help people who want to save time and broaden their diet. We hope to empower the consumer with choices and provide a resource to analyse food labels and information that was difficult, if not impossible, to find.

We are an independent company free of any links to manufacturers. We simply analyse the nutrients and ingredients on the back of food labels and present the information in an easy to understand format.

What other information can you give me about your site that you think the public would be interested in knowing?
The knowledge that powers this site is not garnered from one source. Instead we have taken an open approach to building the ingredient database. We are not nutritionists but rather mediators of information. We have worked with and utilised resources from cause related organizations, health professionals, government agencies and educational institutions in order to build our ingredient data base. We hope to leverage these relationships as well as the knowledge of the consumer to continue to develop the database, positioning it as a global source of ingredient knowledge.

FoodEssentials is an agent for change. By focusing consumer attention and providing transparency we believe we will become a positive agent for change. Please support us by visiting FoodEssentiials.com and telling your supermarket manager about us. Together we can make a change.

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