This month, Check Your Food CEO Matt Wright is… Minding His Own Business
Tell us who you are and what you do
I am Matt Wright and for the last 15 years I have been running a specialist information systems agency catering for the TV distribution industry. We do high-end business-to-business web systems, exhibition systems and iPad apps for clients like Sky Vision, ALL3Media and Zodiak Rights.
However, last year I decided to start a new information business based around my hobby of nutrition. I also launched Check Your Food, which is a website that makes the science behind micronutrients accessible and useful to all.
We all know we need vitamin C but how many of us know which ingredients are highest in Vitamin C, how much we need on a daily basis according to our gender and age, and the effect cooking our food has on how much is left? And so Check your Food Ltd was born. Myself, Ric and Surya pooled our combined expertise in creating high-end information systems and have nearly built checkyourfood.com
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
The excitement that we are creating a revolutionary new tool that will change the way people look at the food they are eating. Every day I also set myself an exciting new task on researching the latest discoveries within micronutrition and health.
What might an average day look like?
I generally get to work around 8 to 8.30 and check the emails I have sent myself the night before on ideas or realisations I have had whilst catching up with the third season of Breaking Bad.
I then try and do some study (I am taking an Open University course on biology which looks at nutrition at a cellular level). Then I take a look at our next info gram tweet that Surya has put together on for example: ‘The top 5 reasons to eat tinned sardines’.
I often liaise with Ric, our systems designer, on where the site build is up to and how any new data needs to be ordered. I incessantly google areas of nutrition that I need to learn about like the effects of vitamin E on brain health. I am a member of most of the world’s leading nutrition organisations so I have a bundle of emails to read on a daily basis.
Oh and occasionally I have to attend to my current business (OTV Ltd) and deal with cash flow, personnel issues, client requests etc.
What are the best bits of the job?
Seeing our ideas become concrete as the site reaches beta stage as new bits are added and actually see a dream coming true as I can now check what is in my ingredients and meals, something I have wanted to do for many years.
And the worst?
Ask any small business owner and you will get the same answer – CASH FLOW! Our existing business is earning money but we have had to borrow money to set up checkyourfood.com, so Surya, our FD, keeps me up to date with where we are at and we have to re-jig expenditure and cross our fingers just like everyone else.
What sets you apart from the competition?
I think it is our unique approach to data. With our experience we are experts at turning inaccessible data into useful information and we have considered at length everything users may want as we are also ‘punters’ first and system designers second.
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If you were King for a day, what would you change?
I would make a working knowledge of nutrition compulsory in education and make it the first thing medical practitioners study and apply in their daily working lives; remember that it was Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who said – “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food”.
Checkyourfood.com will be a subscription-based site with no sponsorship or advertising and to download the free information guide or for more information visit www.checkyourfood.com
Twitter handle – @checkyourfoods
Facebook – /checkyourfoods [/two_third]
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