Category
Service Design Case Study
Strategy Design
UI/UX Design
Duration
4 weeks, Sep 2024
Tools
Figma
Final Cut ProX
Overview
We all eat every day, but have you noticed and wondered why two people eat the same meal but feel completely different afterwards?
This project uses ZOE, the UK’s leading personalised nutrition brand, as a critical lens to explore how science&data, marketing and design could redefine our everyday relationship with food.
More than just a case study, it proposes a future vision for how ZOE could expand its impact through the food labelling system, sparking systemic change in how we understand health and choice.
Role
I played two key roles in this project.
As the researcher, I explored ZOE’s challenges and opportunities, from user churn patterns to the broader food traffic light system.
Beyond research, I also worked on the translation of insights into design, developing a UI/UX concept that make the ideas more visual, testable, and actionable.
Reflection
This case study, completed in September 2024, explored ZOE’s business model, personalisation capabilities, and strategic opportunities to enhance its societal value. As I write this in 2025, our key takeaway has been unexpectedly validated: ZOE has launched its AI photo scanner and Processed Food Risk Scale as standalone tools in the US and secured $15 million in Series B+ funding.
This external validation shows that this strategy successfully anticipated the business needs of a fast-moving health-tech company, demonstrating our ability to spot market shifts and shape product strategies that align with user needs and investment priorities.
Research Process
Who is ZOE? Why ZOE?
ZOE is a personalised nutrition company founded in London, England. It is a pioneering force in research into the unique ways individuals respond to food.
Instead of a "one-size-fits-all" approach to dieting, ZOE champions the belief that an individual’s unique biology determines how they should eat for optimal health.
The company was founded by a team combining deep science and tech leadership:
Professor Tim Spector OBE (Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London), Jonathan Wolf (Data Science Leader and CEO) and George Hadjigeorgiou (Entrepreneur and Co-founder).
ZOE's entire approach is built on large-scale scientific research. Members begin with an at-home test kit that lasts for about 14 days(includes a gut test, a blood fat test and a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM)), which is used alongside a specialised test muffins meal. The data collected is then compared with ZOE's extensive research database to create a personalised nutrition report, which is delivered through the ZOE app. A key feature of the app is the Meal Score (from 1-100).
Since its incorporation in 2017, ZOE has focused on public education through channels like its popular podcast and newsletter. More recently, it entered a "world-first" retail collaboration with M&S Food to launch a branded product, the M&S Food x ZOE Gut Shot, successfully bringing ZOE's science to a wider consumer base.
#Why do/ don't customers choose ZOE? (Research Data before Oct, 2024)
Through the research and interviews, I actually saw a variety of voices towards ZOE, and there are some interesting findings:
For the people who are curious to try out the service, actually found to be expensive and only useful for a very short span of time. The meal logging feature is too time-consuming and frustrating for users.
Users with chronic illnesses (like diabetes or people with cholesterol problems, menopause, etc) got more value from the service. They were not bothered by the meal logging feature because Zoe helped some users reverse their diagnosis and improve their overall health and habits.
We're curious...
01
Data shows that 50% of users leave ZOE after six to nine months.
What drives this? How to keep their curious users and build healthy habits?
User Churn
02
Is there a need for such personalised nutrition services in the food industry?
How to let ZOE catch this trend and achieve long-term behaviour change?
Market Demand
#Problem Definition
To understand public perceptions and needs around personalised nutrition, we designed a set of questions focusing on food choices, science-based diets and meal tracking.
We then conducted street interviews in a campus canteen, engaging participants in casual conversations to capture real, everyday perspectives.
Our research revealed that people often
mistake low-calorie foods for healthy ones,
make situational rather than intentional eating decisions,
and face cultural bias in food tracking systems that fail to recognise diverse diets.
Let me introduce you to Matt — a ZOE user who decided to leave after four months.
“I like the idea,” he said, “but it’s expensive, and honestly, I don’t have time to log everything I eat.” Also, even when he rated a meal poorly, he’d still eat it — simply because it was already bought or made.
His experience revealed two major barriers:
> the high cost and limited flexibility of the plan
> the friction of daily food uploads, which made the app feel more like work than help.
However, personalised nutrition is a trend.
The personalised nutrition industry is on track to nearly double in size over the next five years. Valued at $15.8 billion in 2025, the category is expected to nearly double to $31 billion by 2030, according to a new report from MarketsandMarkets.
Rising healthcare costs and an increased focus on wellness are fueling demand for nutrition as prevention. Consumers, particularly millennials and Gen Z, see personalised nutrition as part of a broader self-care routine, aligning food choices with long-term health goals and chronic disease management.
These insights highlight a key opportunity for ZOE — to bridge the gap between personalised nutrition knowledge and everyday food decisions through more inclusive and contextual design under this “food as medicine” era.
The problems to be solved…
1
(Customer)
How might we
provide more relevant value to users based on their unique nutritional needs and motivations?
2
(Marketing)
How might we enhance
preventative healthcare
for people at risk of
type2 diabetes?
3
(Social impact)
How might we
enable consumers to
make nutritional choices
based on trusted advice when shopping for groceries?
Design
Why is this innovation for making good diet choices necessary?
There are forces acting against the consumer making good diet choices for their health, and the traffic light food labelling system followed the same trend. The foods you see here were all labelled as green, which would indicate they are a healthy option, when in fact they offer close to 0 nutritional value.
The history of the food industry funding nutritional research deliberately confuses the consumer
Over 50% of food sold in supermarkets now is ultra-processed
We also conducted a simple but revealing experiment to test the difference between traditional and personalise modern nutritional advice.
Using peanut butter as a case study, we saw a fundamental conflict:
The NHS app advised the customer to avoid peanut butter, often suggesting a swap for an artificially sweetened, zero-nutritional-value syrup. This reflects an outdated focus on solely limiting fat and calories.
The ZOE app, conversely, rated the same peanut butter as beneficial for gut health and a source of important nutrients. This advice is grounded in personalized metabolic and microbiome data.
We replicated this test across a range of everyday products, consistently observing this divergence. This confirms that ZOE's value proposition is not just personalization, but a complete paradigm shift away from one-dimensional nutrition metrics (like fat/calories) toward a holistic view of food's impact on gut and metabolic health.
#APP function re-design:
Grocery scan+personalised traffic light system
We've determined that ZOE's food scoring engine isn't the problem—the user journey is. The real barriers are rooted in the moment of truth: the friction of the upload process, the missed opportunity of forgotten entries, and the inherent waste of the sunk cost effect (cooking a low-scoring meal before it's too late to change).
Our new strategy moves ZOE's intervention much earlier: to the meal preparation stage.
We designed solutions that let users proactively learn and adapt their nutritional choices by influencing a meal's score from the outset, turning cooking into a continuous learning loop.
(See the information architecture diagram and demo below)
