Don't Eat That: An iPhone Application Success Story

Don’t Eat That: An iPhone Application Success Story

by Bill French on 01/03/10 at 5:00 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Dwayne Ratleff is an average kind of a guy; but also someone who had a simple vision – how to make it easier to understand food packaging labels. His vision eventually took shape in a Top 25 iPhone application in less than 9 months and not without some sweat equity and a little pain.

When Dwayne first decided to create a way to better understand food labels he had reached the age of 50 and he was was inspired to get healthier. He knew a big part of that involved changing what he ate. The first step in this change was reading food labels and he soon realized that the ingredients listed on packaging was not only gibberish, it didn’t provide the details necessary to know what’s good and what’s bad. My wife often says, “If it’s hard to pronounce, it’s all bad. There are just degrees of badness”.

For nearly six months Dwayne started searching for better information so he could be adequately informed about what he was eating and avoid potentially dangerous foods. It was then that he got the idea to build an iPhone application to help him stay within the vague guidelines that had emerged from his research. Dwayne didn’t own an iPhone and had no programming skills. What he did have was a theme for the app; Don’t Eat That.

The premise of Don’t Eat That

, ironically the antithesis of an e-commerce app, is to help you avoid foods that are unhealthy. To make such an app successful required a ton of additional research and experimentation. To be successful in mobile application development, business requirements are key. But as you read Dwayne’s personal account of the research and requirements process, you’ll quickly see that he had to develop the requirements in an agile fashion, similar in some respects to the principles of agile software development.

First, I tapped into the FDA database called EAFUS (Everything Added to Food in The United States). It contains over 3,000 ingredients and additives. This would become the initial data source for the data for my program. As EAFUS does not contain a lot of information useful to the average person, I began to search for these ingredients one by one on the Internet. There were several facts that came to my attention right away. The first was that information was scant and thinly dispersed. Second, there are other food safety organizations besides the FDA; however, they often did not agree with the FDA’s recommendations. Third and most important, false claims often ranked as high as facts in search results.

A systematic approach was needed, one that would gather as much information as possible and filter out erroneous or conflicting claims. Searches would have to be done multiple times with multiple tags. Tags like ‘cancer’, ‘banned’, and ‘allergies’ would be added to search terms to see if there was a connection. Where there were conflicting claims, I employed a method by which I added the tag words ‘hoax’ or ‘myth’ to my search queries. This would clear up many, but not all, of the conflicts. At times, I would leave information about the conflicts in the database just so the consumer would be aware of them. I make no bones about the fact that this application errs in favor of the consumer. After checking well known ingredients such as lime, garlic, oregano, thyme, nutmeg, and other common spices and finding no problem with them, they were excluded to make the database more manageable. After about 1,000 hours of time (minimum approximate), I had a database of over 1,500 additives and ingredients.

Dwayne’s investment is a significant outlay of human capital, but the dividends that this investment will pay are likely well worth it. But Dwayne makes an excellent point about information purity in general:

The Internet can be a great tool for gathering information if you have the time, and for this reason, condensing information gleaned from the Internet and packaging it in easy to use applications is going to be a booming business in the future.

Dwayne is absolutely right – useable mobile data represents a huge market opportunity in mobile computing. The ability to access unshaped information from a mobile device may be a compelling argument for connectivity, but successful mobile information stories will have an element of data repackaging. Humans are keen for apps that create guideposts; apps that cut away all the crap and help them do a job or perform a task faster, quicker, more efficiently. We like guardrails that keep us on the track and lead us to good conclusions.

Along the data packaging axis, Dwayne created something really new. The book “Something Really New” describes attributes of successful products and services. As the project neared completion in November 2009, many apps had begun to spring up similar to Don’t Eat That but the information consisted of food additives only, which number less than 500 terms. Don’t Eat That includes food additives but it also addresses the lack of information on food labels for genetically modified foods in the USA and Canada, a compilation of more than 1500 additional substances, 1400 o which I think I personally consumed during the Super Bowl. Dwayne’s database dwarfs the competition with its sheer volume and comprehensive data.

Don’t Eat That broke the Top 25 of the App Store’s Health and Fitness category after being featured in Gizmodo’s ‘This Week’s Best iPhone Apps’ list in February. Upon learning of this achievement, Dwayne said:

This was a great thrill. While the ranking of Don’t Eat That in the App Store was extremely satisfying, I have to say it still isn’t quite as rewarding as knowing that the app is helping people all over the world live healthier.