As a startup, you know you're on the right track when your first customer is the United States government.
That was the case for Chicago-based Label Insight, a startup that launched in 2008 to provide food product transparency through data science. Label Insight built a first-of-its-kind database to track the ingredients in every food product in the US, with the goal of helping people with allergies and other dietary restrictions know exactly what they should and should not buy from the super market--essentially building the Google Search of food product data.
Its technology caught the eye of the Food and Drug Administration in 2009 when the agency signed a five-year, multi-million dollar deal with the startup to use its data. Label Insight has since re-upped their deal with the FDA for another five years, and added other customers like the USDA and Unilever. The company works with around 75% top 50 food brands in the US.
"We very quickly learned that it wasn’t that the industry didn't want to engage in transparency, it was that they couldn’t. They struggled with data," said Label Insight co-founder Anton Xavier, who launched the company with his brother Dagan.
While brothers Anton and Dagan, New Zealand natives who moved to Chicago to launch Label Insight have landed big-name clients, they originally set out to solve a problem for just one person: their father.
Over a decade ago their dad became sick and had to dramatically alter his diet and remove certain ingredients from what he ate. Dagan would scour the grocery store shelves, noting the product ingredients on as many items as he could in order to determine what would be safe for his father to eat. The store manager got suspicious of Dagan and on several occasions threw him out of the store, before eventually stopping to ask Dagan why he was collecting all the product information.
When the manager learned it was for his father to have more data on product ingredients, he asked Dagan if he could buy the information from him.
"That was the bingo moment where we sat back and realized our situation wasn’t the minority," Dagan said. "In fact, we were the majority. There were millions of people out there with the same issues, the same needs for transparency and the need for more data."
"We could be helping millions and millions of people by giving access to this data," he said.
Today, Label Insight's enterprise product helps give manufacturers and retailers access to product data, allowing them to "collaborate around a single view of their product information," Anton said.
Label Insight has been growing quickly, and it now up to 80 employees in its Chicago and St. Louis offices. In February the company raised $10 million in a round led by KPMG Capital.
Anton and Dagan say Label Insight has benefitted by being centrally located, as many of its major food brand customers are based in the Midwest.
"We’ve explored moving to the coast, but were very happy being in the Midwest," Anton said. "We can't grow fast enough."
The goal is for Label Insight to eventually make its data publicly available so not just government agencies and brands, but families dealing with a sick loved one, can utilize the information as well.
Image via Label Insight
