More than half of Dutch citizens live with a chronic disease. Most of it, current research suggests, is preventable through diet. But supermarkets are stocked with over 70% ultra-processed food. And packaging is so complex that most people find it difficult to make healthy choices.
So how do we then make the healthy choice the easy choice?
That is the question that starts this week’s episode with Anke Kuik. After selling a startup she had co-founded, she started studying food and along the way discovered that the labels meant to help people choose better can be gamed: manufacturers can add isolated vitamins or fiber to boost a nutrition score without making the product any healthier to eat.
So, she founded FLTRD (pronounced “Filtered”), and she made it her mission to make the healthy choice the easy choice. Her app scans supermarket products and scores them with PureScore, a system built specifically to catch what nutrition labels like Nutri-Score miss.
In episode 170, Anke walks us through the science behind that score, how she built an app with so far more than 35,000 downloads and 27k active users, and what she’s looking for in her current funding round.
Plus, you’ll discover what she learned from outsourcing the development of the app.
You can listen to the episode by pressing play below.
How FLTRD’s PureScore Makes Healthy Food Choices Easy | Show notes for episode 170 with Anke Kuik
- Anke Kuik Co-founder and CEO of FLTRD
- Dirkjan Hupkes Host
- License: All rights reserved
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
When developing FLTRD, Anke deliberately stayed away from making it about a binary good vs. bad choice. She believes that it is better to educate people about the benefits and risks of food so they can make their own choices. It’s an example of the takeaways from this episode. Here are three more:
1. Keep core activities in-house
Anke outsourced FLTRD’s first version to an external agency. That choice worked until she ran out of money. She realized that having every change go through the agency cost her too much money. Her decision to start working with an internal CTO wasn’t just budget-based: “we need somebody in-house who can build it.” The lesson is that outsourcing works best when your team already has the mission-critical knowledge.
2. Be deliberate about what is ‘free’ in your product.
Anke keeps FLTRD’s core scan free, but her reasoning is specific: “our mission is to make the healthy choice the easy choice… the app needs to be available and accessible to everyone.” So the free tier to her is more than an acquisition tool; it exists because it fits FLTRD’s actual mission. Founders considering a free tier in their product should ask themselves if ‘free’ is an easy default without a real underlying signal, or a real part of their mission.
3. Look for investors who bring more than capital
When we discuss her fundraising efforts, Anke is explicit about what type of investors she’s looking for. Rather than money to fill the round, she wants angels on her cap table with retail and FMCG network access specifically. It’s advice you’ve heard on this podcast before. The takeaway here is that being specific about what you want out of the investor-founder relationship greatly increases the chances of finding the right capital for your startup.
The core lesson from these takeaways is that Anke is very deliberate about operating FLTRD in such a way that it contributes to her mission.
🤗 Know a founder who is building a food or health app and raising capital? Put them on the right (capital) track by sharing these do’s and don’ts with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction to Anke Kuik and FLTRD |
| 06:55 | Developing the concept and building the first app |
| 12:01 | Why healthy supermarket choices are so difficult |
| 14:21 | What “ultra-processed” food really means |
| 18:09 | PureScore vs. Nutriscore |
| 22:56 | Personal responsibility, pricing, and the food system |
| 25:10 | How the PureScore works |
| 29:03 | Scanning products and choosing better alternatives |
| 31:19 | Keeping the app free and building a business model |
| 34:40 | Working with supermarkets and the B2B opportunity |
| 37:35 | Fundraising, traction, and growth plans |
| 39:52 | Health impact and scientific validation |
| 43:18 | Publicity, media attention, and founder visibility |
| 46:40 | How bringing a CTO in-house changed the company |
| 49:00 | Finding investors with strategic value |
| 50:10 | Advice for an AI-powered founder funding platform |
| 54:06 | Where to find FLTRD & closing |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Initially, Anke wanted to set up a supermarket chain with healthy foods. Because it was a bit too ambitious, she decided to build an app that ‘magically’ translates really complex research about food into a simple score so customers can make more educated choices. While listening to her story, you will spot these magical moments too:
Using regulation to support willpower.
When we discuss where personal responsibility ends and system change begins, Anke highlights how a shopping environment impacts the choices people make. Hamburgers are often cheaper than apples, and at petrol stations there is no healthy food to be found. It’s when she proposed a policy fix that could do the trick: make healthy food cheaper and make unhealthy foods or ultra-processed foods much more expensive. That way, regulation can support people’s willpower.
Traffic lights, not red crosses
Along the same lines, Anke rejects the idea that an app promoting healthy food should shame people into compliance: “we don’t really want to point fingers and restrict people because I don’t think that’s what people need.” It’s why FLTRD uses a traffic light that is designed to help users make fewer ultra-processed choices, recognizing that choosing an orange product is “totally fine” as long as people are aware of it.
The food matrix reveal
A third magical insight comes when Anke explains why a product can score well on a nutrition label without actually being healthy. Manufacturers can add isolated fiber or vitamins to boost a score, but nutrients don’t work in isolation. They’re embedded in what she calls the “food matrix,” the natural structure of whole food. Strip that structure away, and the added nutrients don’t function the way customers think when reading the labels.
The true magic is this: these moments all show what Anke actually optimizes for: clarity over control, and honesty over guilt.
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it one of these or another moment entirely? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
When I ask why FLTRD stays free even without revenue, Anke ties the answer directly back to her mission:
"I believe the biggest impact really comes from helping as many people as possible make better decisions in the supermarkets."
— Anke Kuik, CEO and Co-founder of FLTRD
Every free scan, she explains, contributes to that mission. It's the clearest example in the episode of a founder decision made on principle rather than pure growth math.
💡 Feeling inspired to make an impact? The blog is public, so feel free to share the quote with someone else who needs to hear about it.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
There are not a whole lot of episodes in this podcast about food or the impact of it on our health. But that does not mean there are no links with other episodes. Here are three:
Prevention is better than the cure, except when you’re trying to change a system
Anke makes it clear from the start of our conversation: the premise of FLTRD is prevention. She argues that better food choices are key to heading off chronic disease before it starts. She believes that the traction of the app will persuade investors. That does not mean it will be easy. As Laurie Lancee, said in episode 99: “prevention actually turned out to be very difficult to sell to investors” because they want to see results right away. This mimics the conversation in episode 163 where Dr. Robin Blackstone, a healthcare innovator, says that currently healthcare pays for treatment, not for “helping them understand what they can do today to prevent being really sick tomorrow.”
Doing the research first, as protection against building the wrong thing
Anke’s own PureScore didn’t happen quickly. Because “the Pure Score translates really complex science into something practical that consumers can really use while they're shopping," she had to deep dive into a lot of research before even starting to build the app. We’ve heard that too in episode 163, where Dr. Robin Blackstone didn’t start writing her framework until she’d built the ground for it: an executive program with the Financial Times and Pearson, an MIT digital-technologies certificate, then an AI deep dive at Oxford. And in episode 164, Mirjam Weemhoff, founder of Saturn Pelvic Health, shares how she put fifteen years into MRI research about the functional mechanics of how a pessary behaves inside the pelvic floor, before designing and building FlexSupp.
Having no technical co-founder can be a handicap
Anke outsourced the development of the FLTRD app to an external agency. Even though the agency did good work, outsourcing turned out not to be the best choice. When she realized it was burning through her investment, she pulled development in-house: “getting Laurens [her CTO and co-founder] on board has changed the whole journey massively” in a positive way. That isn’t just her story. Philipp Omenitsch, a former founder and CTO who has analyzed 17,000+ pitch decks through Pitch League AI, found that key functions like tech and sales in early-stage startups are “very difficult to delegate”. Izzy Sayers mentions something similar in episode 152: core activities get hired for, not outsourced. Does that mean you need to hire a CTO? No, but like Kuhu Singh (episode 117), you will need to teach yourself the necessary skills.
The thread that combines these three is defensibility. When founders are able to defend the product, the research behind it and the team composition, it makes the business case for investors more defensible as well.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Every emergency system on the market assumes you can act: press a button, make a call, say a safe word. But in the moment it matters most, that assumption is exactly what fails.
In episode 171, I talk with Anniek van Veldhuizen, CCO and co-founder of MyHives, about designing safety technology for that exact moment, when someone can't act on their own behalf. Anniek and her co-founder Nelson built MyHives to turn daily, unmeasured feelings of unsafety into data that can actually be acted on, using privacy-first technology that keeps everything on the user's own device.
In the clip below, Anniek explains how Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women opened her eyes to the gender data gap, and why a system that only counts reported incidents will always miss most of what's actually happening. It's the foundation the rest of the episode, including the design for that moment, is built on.
Curious to hear how she transforms feelings of unsafety into data for a safer society? Leave your email below to find episode 171 in your inbox on 24 September at 8:00 CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
Ultimately, this episode is about an app that changes behavior and, with that, hopefully, a system. It does so by translating really complex science about healthy food choices into an easy-to-understand aid for people who want to eat healthy foods.
To me, the part about the food matrix was very insightful. Like many people, I fall for the claims about extra fiber, protein, iron and the like. Learning that food, like many other things are part of a system made me realize that healthy ingredients don't necessarily produce a healthy meal. It also made me aware of some of my ill-informed food choices, like Anke’s comparison between crisps with a little bit of salt and olive oil versus flavored crisps.
What I found particularly nice about FLTRD is that it is food positive and research-backed. Also, the knowledge that is embedded in the app gives customers back the agency to make the right choices. And the data that comes from the app can also help to persuade supermarkets to start reducing the overload (70%) of ultra-processed foods on their shelves.
At the same time, I don’t think that leaving the choice with consumers will cause a change in behavior. It may help in showing people that healthy alternatives exist and where to find them. But, as Anke and I agreed during the conversation, real systems change will require some sort of stimulus, making healthy food cheaper and unhealthy food more expensive. In that sense, FLTRD, like the foods it helps to select, fits into a bigger system. One that is in need of change toward healthier habits. FLTRD is helping by making the healthy choice the easy choice.
Listen to the full conversation with Anke Kuik on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Anke Kuik
Anke Kuik built her early career in digital advertising in London, working in data and technology for seven years before moving back to the Netherlands. There, she co-founded Faktor, a privacy technology company later acquired by LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP). After working for the acquiring company for a few years, she started studying nutrition, work that led her to a statistic she couldn't ignore: more than half of Dutch citizens live with a chronic disease, much of it preventable through diet.
That discovery became FLTRD, the consumer app she now runs as co-founder and CEO. FLTRD scans supermarket products and scores them with PureScore, built to catch what labels like Nutri-Score can miss, so people can make healthier choices in a single scan.
Anke regularly speaks about ultra-processed food and its impact on health, including through workshops, and is currently raising FLTRD's funding round to grow the team and accelerate adoption.
Interested in partnering with FLTRD around health and food? Reach out to Anke directly on LinkedIn.
About FLTRD
FLTRD is a Dutch consumer app that helps people reduce their consumption of ultra-processed food, one scan at a time. Point the app at a supermarket product, and it returns a PureScore between 0 and 100: 100 means the product is close to its original, unprocessed form; 0 means it's fully ultra-processed. The app also suggests better alternatives, without asking people to give up convenience food altogether.
Co-founded by Anke Kuik and CTO Laurens, FLTRD is built around a traffic-light system, aimed at raising awareness rather than dictating choices. The core scanning feature is available for free, a deliberate decision tied to FLTRD's mission of making the healthy choice the easy choice. The company is now exploring a B2B model that would let supermarkets license the PureScore for their own platforms.
The app now recognizes over 75,000 products in supermarkets and has surpassed 35,000 downloads and 27,000 active users, and its scoring methodology has been validated by the University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam. FLTRD has also been featured in several major Dutch publications, including AD, Telegraaf, and Het Parool.
Want to see how your own groceries score? Download the FLTRD app in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. You can also learn more by visiting the website or following FLTRD on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Listen to Episode 170 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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