Interview with Devin Visani, CEO of Weeshop
March 17, 2022
Interview with Devin Visani, CEO of Weeshop, a startup that educates people on food quality, health, environmental sustainability, and social impact.
Consumers are becoming increasingly keen on purchasing healthy and sustainable foods. In recent years, in fact, we’ve become much more conscious of the importance of eating healthy foods in order to protect our health and well-being. It’s difficult to know what we’re buying in terms of quality, health, environmental, and social sustainability while we’re out shopping. That’s why Weeshop was created: to address this issue!
What is Weeshop?
Weeshop is an app that will assist you in making conscious purchases in order to improve your health and well-being while also being environmentally conscious. Just scan the barcode to acquire a full list of product details, including nutritional values, raw material origin, certifications, and much more!
Each piece of information on the platform is objectively presented and supported by a color that helps you to discern positive features from any risk factors, all of which are based only on scientific criteria and regulated, such as CREA guidelines, WHO or EFSA scientific opinions.
Because the final decision is always up to you, based on your needs, the products are not assigned a score.
Keep reading this article to find an interview we conducted with Devin Visani, the CEO of this startup, if you want to learn more about Weeshop in depth.
Hi Devin, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for the time you are dedicating to us. Tell us a little bit more about Weeshop. How and when was the idea for Weeshop born?
Weeshop was born from a disappointed expectation, now more than two years ago. Indeed, the concept came to me after I wanted to try a new product because of a marketing promise. Unfortunately, the experience was not pleasant, and I began to question why there wasn’t a tool to assist me in finding the ideal foods for my needs. Knowing what to expect before, during, and after a grocery shopping trip thanks to a service that makes everything simple and quick, “at touch.”: that was our desire.
The pact that I later made with myself was about the approach, the idea had to be born as scientific and unbiased, a guide to food buying awareness that was built on knowledge that could provide a firm path to this objective, despite the world’s huge uncertainty.
As a result, Weeshop was established, an app that contains all relevant “from the label” information about items and producers in terms of quality, healthiness, environmental sustainability, and social impact. A translator who aims to empower consumers by delivering a paradigm of food education that should be accessible to all.
How did you launch your startup? Did you make use of crowdfunding campaigns?
The first free beta version was released in May of last year. Starting to walk our creature and seeing how the market reacted was a crucial step. We attempted to stress the prototype as much as possible to understand what people desired in preparation for the next edition, our premium, which was published in January.
Obviously, we do not consider it a point of arrival; there are several opportunities for improvement, and we spend our days figuring out what we want to be when we grow up, as well as how to improve our service in an organic and continuous way.
Crowdfunding is an option we’ve been considering and want to pursue soon: for a project with significant impact potential, such as Weeshop, we believe it could be a suitable option.
What sets Weeshop apart from other web-based applications?
Weeshop stands out because of its unique market position. We are the most exhaustive in terms of the issues we cover regarding 360-degree food information (healthiness, sustainability, social effect, and quality “at your fingertips”), and we approach our purpose with a scientific and impartial mindset.
All of this while being on the side of the consumer, with a clear desire to establish a world that is accessible and immediate, free of ambiguity and inaccuracies. We can be thought of as a virtual assistant for your mindful food shopping: we provide you with all the necessary tools so that you can choose what is best for you. In addition, if you want to deepen certain topics, we have a large section “Educational” divided into sections (Curiosity, Nutrition, Sustainability and Etiquette) with intriguing and direct articles that allow you to feed your hunger for knowledge.
It’s not only a matter of mission and vision, however, we also have a competitive advantage centered on a product-producer database that is qualitatively unique on the market and gets richer every day, and we are the first B2C reality to implement augmented reality, making the service even faster, more immediate and personalized according to the needs of the user.
Have you thought about any partnership with the various supermarkets?
Supermarkets are undoubtedly a fascinating source of information for us. We’ve talked to some of the country’s most well-known businesses in the past to see if there were any openings, and we’ve come up with notable ideas and stimuli as a result.
We don’t want to jeopardize our independence or transparency, but the options are numerous; time and strategic horizons must be considered in order to arrive at a mutually beneficial solution. We may become a cross-brand service in the future, or we could work together in the short term for go-to-market purposes, such as having our app tested in stores. Time will give us advice but the fact is that we are open and interested in possible developments, after all, the consumer trends on which we act are the most up-to-date and relevant ones, common to those that retailers monitor, and we think we could be a high value-added service to innovate their stores and simultaneously improve the consumer experience.
What are your long-term ambitions?
There are a number of projects in the works, and we are currently in the traditional phase of gathering various resources before bolstering the service.
We can’t give too many details just yet, but the main points on which we want to focus are improving what’s already in the app, particularly our database, which is unquestionably time-consuming in terms of effort and currently contains over 20,000 references, but also ensuring that the service becomes increasingly “tailor-made,” engaging, and integrated into consumers’ daily lives.
In other words, an improvement that must have qualitative connotations, a perspective that we have always chosen to the quantitative one, which we do not consider winning when dealing with specific difficulties.
Curiosity: The Premium version of Weeshop is a new feature this year; could you explain to us what it is?
Weeshop’s premium edition, which has been accessible in the Apple and Google stores since January, is currently the best and most totalizing experience in terms of conscious food information via app.
The service has no boundaries in terms of favorites to save, the option to create and share convenient shopping lists with other premium members, and the ability to customize the entire service to your dietary needs. Finally, the aforementioned augmented reality is undoubtedly one of Weeshop’s most inventive features, with a bright future ahead of it: select the characteristic of a product that most interests you, and it will display in a “bubble” overlay whenever you frame the shelf or just many products at once.
Credits:
