For Ulupreneur Samantha Citro Alexander, the dining room table has always been the heart of family life. Yet alongside the joy of shared meals came the difficult reality of gastrointestinal issues, life-threatening allergies, and other serious diet-related conditions that affected loved ones. Mealtime carried a constant tension: the desire to gather as a family, weighed down by the complexity of navigating so many dietary restrictions.
After a short but successful acting career, Samantha transitioned into the beauty industry, becoming an executive for brands like Clinique and Smashbox. She helped these legacy companies reinvent themselves during the clean-beauty movement—an industry-wide shift driven by consumer demand for transparency, clarity, and healthier ingredients.
But her passion had always been food. And Samantha could see that the same transformation happening in beauty was coming for the food industry. She wanted to be one of the leaders shaping it.
In 2020, she co-founded Bitewell, now The FoodHealth Company, with a clear mission: to make it simple for people to understand what’s in their food and how it impacts their health. At the center of the platform is a breakthrough innovation—the FoodHealth Score.
We spoke with Samantha as FoodHealth Co, in partnership with NielsenIQ, released its first comprehensive analysis of the health of America’s grocery carts. The “food health check-up” evaluates more than 200 billion grocery purchases and 70,000 household receipts, offering one of the clearest pictures to date of how Americans eat.
(You can download the report here.)
What is The FoodHealth Company?
We’re a nutrition data company, and our core product is the FoodHealth Score. It does exactly what it promises: we score food to show consumers how healthy it is. We score everything—packaged products, prepared meals, produce—on a scale from 1 to 100.
A score of 100 means the product is highly nutritious, made with high-quality ingredients.
A score of 1 means the opposite—it may barely qualify as food. And, of course, most products fall somewhere in between.
Imagine you’re browsing frozen pizzas on a grocery app. FoodHealth Co’s smart-swapping technology surfaces healthier alternatives you’re likely to buy based on your preferences and price sensitivity. The entire experience is designed to remove friction and empower healthier choices in real time.
How does the partnership with Kroger work?
If you shop at Kroger, you’ve likely used their app for loyalty points and rewards. Now, as you walk through the store, you can scan any item and instantly see its FoodHealth Score, along with suggested healthier swaps. The score appears right next to the product’s nutrition facts panel, and you can even see the overall score of your entire cart.
We believe the best way to transform the food system is to embed ourselves inside it. Partnering with major retailers is essential to that vision.
What’s it been like working with Ulu Ventures?
What have been your biggest milestones this year?
The first milestone was launching our partnership with Kroger, which put the FoodHealth Score in front of millions of shoppers every week and deepened a collaboration that continues to shape our product roadmap.
A few months after launch, something unexpected happened: food brands began reaching out to us. They wanted to know their score—and they wanted to improve it. We signed our first brand client in March, and that business has grown exponentially.
“We’re working with some of the largest manufacturers in the country to reformulate products eaten by millions of people daily. Some of those reformulated items are already on shelves, meaning the food marketplace is genuinely healthier today because of our work. That is something I’m incredibly proud of.”
Our third milestone was our partnership with NielsenIQ to produce the report on the health of America’s grocery carts. NielsenIQ is one of the industry’s largest providers of food data. We realized we could go to market more quickly through their platform, so we formed a reseller partnership: they ingest our data and sell it alongside their suite of tools.
What advice do you have for fundraisers?
My biggest piece of advice is simple: talk to as many people as you can.
Over the last four years, I’ve spoken with roughly 350 VCs. Only a small number ultimately invested—but I wouldn’t have found those few without casting a wide net.
What are your dreams for The FoodHealth Company?
My greatest hope is that we leave the food system better than we found it. That mission drives me as a leader. Beyond that, I want to build a large, meaningful company—one that improves the lives of millions of people and creates real economic value along the way.
