Why hospital food
The moment this got real for me was in a hospital room, watching a nurse take a food order. The patient was a woman who couldn’t lift her hand or get through a full sentence. The nurse leaned in, offered her choices one at a time, and waited. We had spent months building a patient mobile ordering app, and standing there I understood what was wrong with it. It assumed she could hold a phone, read a menu, and tap a button. Every one of those is an assumption about a healthy person.
The software industry mostly builds for the people with the most money, whether or not anyone says it out loud. A hospital is full of a different 1%: people on the worst days of their lives, who might not be able to hold a phone steady or finish a sentence. Most software gives up on them. But in a hospital they aren’t the edge case, they’re exactly who the product is for.
Hospital food has a reputation, and it’s mostly a joke people make. But hospitals in America serve over three million meals a day, and every one of them has to be safe for the specific person receiving it. One hospital we talked to swapped pesto brands during a supply shortage. The new pesto had traces of nuts, nothing in their system flagged the change, and patients with nut allergies could still order it. A supervisor happened to catch it in time. The margin between fine and dangerous can be as small as a jar of pesto.
Why food, though? I was a sickly child and a picky eater, which drove my parents nuts. We were lucky to have two pediatricians in the family back in India, my uncle and great-uncle, always a phone call away. Their advice moved easily between food and medicine, when to treat something with what you eat and when to go to the pharmacy, and that way of thinking stayed with me. At Carnegie Mellon, my research applied machine learning to health outcomes for lung disease patients. Then I spent a decade building software in fintech, another complicated, heavily regulated industry, and watched good software genuinely transform it. Hospital food looked to me like the same kind of problem, still waiting for that kind of attention.
There’s a simpler reason too. I love working in the places software has overlooked, where everyone’s day is harder than it needs to be. When you build something better there, the difference is immediate and you can see it. And the timing is real: hospitals are starting to treat food as something that changes how patients feel and how they heal, not just a cost to control. The industry is coming around to what my uncles knew all along. Food is medicine.
When Charlton and I started digging into the space, what surprised us most was how long it had been ignored. The last new company to enter it arrived in 1991. Allergen data still lives on paper. The systems don’t talk to each other. The people running these kitchens are feeding a small army three times a day with tools from another era. And underneath, most of what’s broken is less about food than about data, and data problems are ones we know how to solve.
So before we wrote any code, we shadowed the people doing the work. We stood in kitchens, watched trays go out, and followed them up to the rooms. That’s still how we build today, and it’s where family ordering came from. The woman who couldn’t lift her hand couldn’t use our app, but her family could use it for her, so now a daughter in another state can place an order for her mother. Food is one of the only choices a patient gets to make in a hospital. I want it to be safe, and I want it to be worth choosing.