Founder and CEO of Dieture Nuwaid Pocker.
Doha, Qatar: Dieture, a mobile app-based healthy meal prep start-up for food lovers is employing artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce labour hours, human errors, and operation costs.
Using technology, they cook, portion, and deliver healthy food without compromising taste, variety, or flexibility across Qatar and functions on proprietary software integrated with government databases such as the USDA database, automation, and ingredient prediction.
“We utilised this saved cost to procure better-quality ingredients,” said Founder and CEO of Dieture Nuwaid Pocker in an interview with The Peninsula.
He noted that the start-up is now exploring building its AI models to provide insights into further diversifying the offerings to add “tremendous value” to its menu design, customer experience, and overall weight loss journey.
However, the technology has made it easy to offer several meal options with high nutritional accuracy and this increased the number of food choices given to customers in the country.
The fundamental goal of healthy food is to ‘become healthy’, noted the official adding that “Weight loss must be the inevitable by-product of having improved health.”
Pocker, an HEC Paris alumni, founded Dieture in 2018 amidst a challenging business environment and enrolled in the EMBA program to scale the startup.
“Today, Dieture is rewriting the systems of weight loss and wellness by making the journey accessible and fun for everyone. We believe that for consistent results, we should integrate healthy food and the resulting weight loss into our everyday lives instead of a short-term project-based approach, which makes it unsustainable,” he remarked.
He also outlined that the HEC Paris Executive MBA program stood out as the perfect option for geographical reasons and its international reputation.
“The Qatar and Paris campuses also promised a unique opportunity to experience different cultures and business environments, further influencing my decision to join,” Pocker said.
The institute created a safe environment to explore ideas, discuss concepts, and provide frameworks expanding knowledge in this realm, Pocker mentioned.
He further said: “This diversity of experience and expertise gave me various unique insights and perspectives on any challenge I encountered. The program also emphasised a collaborative approach to learning, which meant that everyone was encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas freely. It created a highly supportive and dynamic learning environment that aided me in developing new solutions to challenges in my business.”
Pocker chose Dieture’s scaling as the topic, where he conducted an in-depth analysis of the business employing all the frameworks learned as this document has now become the foundation for its scaling plan.
As Qatar positions itself as a technology hub in the region, the economy of the nation stands robust with competitive platforms in the market. Pocker highlighted that the firm “Pioneered the technological shift in Qatar’s diet food subscription scene, marking early entry into the market. Recently, a few new entrants using white-label apps have been trying to automate some of their functions, which is a good motion, though this approach still lacks data-drivendecision-making.”
Dieture’s early entry and in-house technology development granted the application unique advantages such as ‘years of insights into customers’ preferences’, and the ‘periodic data to measure the effectiveness of various weight loss systems and programs.’
Pocker accentuated that “As a bootstrap, all our innovations and growth directly result from customers’ support and acceptance of our role in the community. Dieture’s entire journey has been self-funded by reinvesting our earnings into improving food quality, technology, and service.”
“We believe ‘if we are on a diet, we go off a diet’. So, our tech-first approach to healthy food concentrates on making healthy living a part of our everyday lives instead of separating it,” he added.
