Today, we are glad to have an exclusive interview with our very own Singapore-based tech startup, Whizmeal, founded by Soon Mei. She explains her idea and her web portal that was featured in Tech in Asia, e27, and Yahoo! News.
What is Whizmeal about?
Soon Mei: Whizmeal was designed to enable parents to understand more about school meals’ nutritional values. By understanding more about nutrition, parents are able to pre-order healthier meal choices, monitor their child’s daily intake and constantly give their child advice on what food they should eat.
How does it work? At our website’s “Order Now”, parents and their child will be able to select either a package meal program or item from a la carte menu. During this pre-ordering process, parents and their child are able to browse the calendar days and read the meal details of the meal they prefer. To complete the meal ordering process, parents will be directed to an online payment system.
How and why did you get started in this industry? Why the decision to build this startup?
Soon Mei: Having been in the F&B Industry for the past 7 years and running the Singapore Food Festival in 2006 & 2007, I noticed that people never really knew if they were eating healthily or not. For example, one would simply assume that eating vegetables is considered as a healthy diet when in fact, the vegetables have been stirred fried with lots of oil.
As such, I felt that the gap between the public and Food & Nutrition is far too great and I strongly believe in educating the young about Food and Nutrition so as to empower them to make better food choices when they grow up. Furthermore as parents, we do not understand how the meals are prepared, thus, I wish to use my experience and knowledge to make a difference and address this gap in the school canteen and childcare market.
Did you seek out any relevant mentors and people for help prior to startup?
Soon Mei: Yes. I took up a program on Specialist Diploma in Franchise and Enterprise Development and started the inception of Whizmeal, as a project. The hands-on experience allowed our team to meet up with several private and public schools to understand the key concerns and consideration at current canteens. As a member of Founder’s Institute of Singapore Chapter, we are very privileged to be able to meet up with Jeff for his advice.
Jeff’s comments:
Very raw but novel concept when I first met them in FI. Part of Intake 5 2012. After four months, the service offering was rigorously shaped. They took another year of hustling at implementing this technology idea in a primary school. The Whizmeal team displayed a lot of passion and grit and kept pushing ahead and I am very glad to see their progress thus far. It is still a long arduous journey ahead.
Are you currently working with investors or bootstrapping?
Soon Mei: We are currently working with a few investors and individuals and are very grateful for all the support they had given us. They recognised the significant value we are trying to create and it is in our pipeline to raise funding to build our core team in future.
Will you turn to the BizSpark program for help in building scale, a team or software?
Soon Mei: To be honest, we have not yet fully tapped on the resources of BizSpark but we are certainly open to any support provided by the BizSpark program. We certainly hope that one day, we will be able to provide a Whizmeal application on Microsoft tablets to various schools and it will definitely help to greatly add value to our business.
What are your future plans for Whizmeal?
Soon Mei: At present, there are close to 200 public primary schools and over 1,000 childcare centers, with an approximate total of 350,000 children. Whizmeal hopes to reach out more to the community, typically to help families from lower-income groups in the future. In the longer term, they hope to cut the obesity rate among Singapore school children by half in 2022.
Head over to www.whizmeal.com to start preparing your child’s healthy meal diet!
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