Epicure: Changing Eating Habits Through Online Grocery Receipts

Changing your eating habits is hard work.

Epicure, a company founded by Cornell Tech students this spring, wants to make it easier.

Epicure is a service that combs your online grocery receipts from retailers like Instacart and Seamless and rates the healthfulness of your purchases and suggests healthier options.

Founders Claire Lambrecht and Rachel Wang, two Cornell Tech MBAs, run the business and product development with Michael Carroll, Technologist-in-Residence, handling the backend of the software.

Epicure works through a Gmail integration that collects your online grocery receipts and uses a stoplight system developed by Stanford University to recommend healthier options. Red designates high calorie or sugared foods, yellow options are slightly better and green are the most healthy options.

“[The system] makes it easy for users to understand which foods are healthy and where there is room for improvement,” Lambrecht explained.

Other healthy eating apps and programs require users to input daily food intake. But with one-click sign-up and the power to analyze past receipts, Epicure can start recommending healthier options almost instantly.

One of Epicure’s biggest hurdles was finding the right market to target. During Startup Studio, customer role-playing exercises, discussions about target audience and one-on-one time with practitioners helped the team narrow their focus to the growing market of online grocery shoppers.

“I think some of the most profound feedback we’ve gotten came from the one-on-ones [with practitioners] through office hours or when you just pull them aside,” Wang explained. “We’ve talked to David Tisch. We’ve talked to Irving Fain. We’ve talked to Brian Schechter. We’ve talked to Greg Pass. Having that kind of access is pretty rare.”

In addition to working with the Startup Studio team, Epicure is advised by Professor Deborah Estrin, director of the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech, who conceived the project before passing it on to Lambrecht, Wang and Carroll to build the business.

Coming from a consulting background, Wang said she appreciated the monthly 24-hour Studio Sprints and weekly Startup Studio classes to help make sense of the unfamiliar world of starting a business.

“The structure of Startup Studio allowed us to stay on top of what we actually needed to get done and to focus on accomplishing that particular concept,” Wang noted. “It gives us some method to the madness.”

Epicure is currently in private beta testing. Next steps for the team include improvements to user experience and building integrations and partnerships with online grocers and health insurance companies.

In addition to winning one of Cornell Tech’s Startup Awards, Epicure had the opportunity to present during NY Tech Meetup earlier this month. They also won TradingScreen’s Technology Entrepreneurship Award at the annual “Dream it. Code it. Win it.” contest organized by Christina Dolan and the MIT Club of New York.

Learn more about Epicure at letsepicure.com or follow them on Twitter @LetsEpicure