Food Transparency Revolution: A Conversation with Foodini’s Dylan McDonnell & Pamela Wirth Artwork

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Hello Health, Moms Empowered

Food Transparency Revolution: A Conversation with Foodini’s Dylan McDonnell & Pamela Wirth

April 28, 2026 • Pamela Wirth

0:00 | 13:49

Dylan McDonnell is the founder and CEO of Foodini, the dietary intelligence company that helps power personalized menus for the 173m Americans with a food allergy or dietary need. A corporate lawyer by trade, he was diagnosed with celiac disease as a child, and has spent the last number of years advocating for increased transparency regarding what is in the food that we eat.

website: foodini.co

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getfoodini/

Instagram and TikTok: @getfoodini

www.gethellohealth.com

Instagram and TikTok and YouTube: @hellohealthnutrition

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SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hi, this is Pamela Wirth with the Hello Health Podcast. And today I have Dylan McDonald. He's the founder and CEO of Foodini, a dietary intelligence company that helps power personalized menus for 173 million Americans with food allergies or dietary needs. You're a corporate lawyer by trade. You were diagnosed with a celiac disease as a child, and you spent a number of years advocating for increased transparency in food, which is so, so, so needed. My own story, one of my kiddos was misdiagnosed with autism. Turns out he had a brain autoimmune disorder. And they said that would be permanent, and it wasn't. And it was largely through changing a lot of what we ate, as well as using some different herbs that would break the blood-brain barrier to really help with that inflammation. And can't wait to learn more about you and welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

So tell us about Food Aiding and what you've created. What are kind of next steps for you and how you have approached this and your take on food and how to help people.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Yeah, so uh a few bits there, I'll I'll try and I'll try and break it out. Um so yeah, no, as you mentioned, diagnosed celiac when I when I was a kid, and just uh ever since one of the it's just been so challenging and difficult to navigate dining out of home with a food allergy. And I'm sure many of your listeners can can resonate with that. Whether it's staff just not having information, whether it's they have the wrong information, whether it's they just don't understand, they give you the wrong food. I've seen it all, and I'm sure most people who have this problem have also. So uh I kind of dug into like why. Like, why is it so hard to get this ingredient transparency when you dine out of home and how many people it really are impacted by this? I was like, you know, you kind of feel like you're in your own bubble and it's just me and a few others. But when I dug into the numbers, you have 33 million Americans that have a diagnosed food allergy, you have another 50 million Americans that have an intolerance, and you have another 70 million Americans that have a lifestyle diet or preference they follow. So it's nearly half the country that requires this form of information and just not available. And so what we do at Fudini is we partner with restaurants, hotels, stadiums, anywhere that serves food. We ingest their menu data, their recipe data, and their product data, uh, and we tag that with all the correct allergy and dietary information, and then that allows us to power a personalized menu experience for the consumer. So consumer can walk into a restaurant we work with, scan a QR code on the menu or allergy dietary needs. Uh, a URL will pop up, they'll create their profile, choosing from 150 different options. So gluten, keto, vegan, ginger, save, and instantly the menu will auto-customized to say, here's what you can eat, here's what you can eat with a modifier, and what that modifier is, and here's what you can't eat and why, because it has these three ingredients that don't correspond with your dietary profile. So think of it as um ingredient transparency for consumers, regardless of what their uh their dietary need is. So that's a quick overlay on what we do. Uh Romani, sorry, what was the next part of that question?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Well, you know, it's it's great. Um where where where do you find that most of your your menus and and um um people can find this type of solution?

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Yeah, there's a broad range. Like we work with, I suppose our bread and butter initially was independent, right? We started with small mom and pop shops. Uh, but as we've grown, you know, we're working more and more with kind of some of the larger chains and groups um uh, you know, and and bigger food service providers. I think one of the main reasons for that from our perspective is they have better data. Like we have a lot of empathy with restaurants. Like restaurants aren't just going around not giving this information for the most part because you know they don't care about consumers. The reason, main reason is they either don't have the data or it's really hard to do to actually get it and keep it up to date. Now, that's kind of one of the things that uh one of the reasons we exist is we make it super easy for the restaurants to provide this information to consumers uh and keep it up to date without it being you know another headache for for management to deal with. But our our main our biggest concentration is definitely uh in California. That's uh where we're headquartered and that's where we've been focused. We are now working with groups that have a presence across the country. We're growing pretty steadily. Um, we do also, I suppose for listeners who are curious about like what does a personalized menu solution look like, we do have an app, uh it's the Fudini app on the App Store. It's in beta at the moment and in LA only, in terms of where the restaurants are. But if there's people listening who just want to chuck their location onto LA and zoom in and see what it looks like when you can get access to real accurate information on what restaurants cater for you and what items on that menu are suitable for you, um, you're more than welcome to check it out. And I think the other point to note there is you know, we you've had you've everyone here has come across solutions before where you know AI is recommending that this is suitable or you know, it's a user Yelp esque review about restaurants. But we took the approach that you know you're either fully accurate or you're wrong, right? So we do utilize AI to ingest and analyze a lot of that menu data, but we have a team of registered dietitians who QA and work with all of our restaurant partners to ensure that the data is accurate. Uh, and we are literally dealing with the chefs directly to make sure that everything is documented correctly. So, you know, you gotta we take this very seriously and and we do a lot of work to make sure our information is correct.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

So tell us a little bit more about how you got into this, um what what to expect, um, where are you going?

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Sure. Um I got into this by accident. Uh as you say, as you kind of said in my intro, I was a corporate lawyer by trade. Um it was really just my personal problem. I I um I was getting more and more frustrated at how difficult it was to navigate. And I just thought that it didn't make sense anymore that consumers didn't have transparency. Uh and you know, it's quite exclusionary as well for a lot of people. Like I'm lucky, I'm not anaphylactic, I'm not gonna die if I accidentally ingest a trace of the wrong thing. But for a lot of people, that is their their reality. And you can feel like a lot of social situations like work dinners and you know, lunches with your friends and whatnot, all of a sudden are off the table if you don't have trust that the information that you're getting from a restaurant is accurate. Uh, and so I think the two major to kind of where I think you're going with your question is the two major trends we see and what we're driving towards is one personalization and two transparency. Consumers now expect personalization, whether it's on Netflix or on DoorDash or on uh you know whatever other apps, a TikTok, you know, they expect the algorithm and the and the and the technology to understand who they are and curate options for them based on that. And I think that's a large part of how our system works in terms of it curates it based on your dietary requirements. And then transparency. I think there was a long time where you know transparency was a nice to have. But I think consumers increasingly, even if put medical aside, um, are more and more focused about what is good for them and what is not and what they're putting into their bodies. And you see personalized nutrition, you see the food is medicine movement, you see, you know, uh function health and superpower and some of these different, you know, biome and gut health testing kits uh coming to the fore and people getting more and more information on what foods agree with them, what foods don't. And and people care, and people are gonna become more and more insistent on avoiding what they need to avoid, and that is gonna permeate and continue to permeate into the restaurant and food service industry. And so we're trying to, I suppose, educate them in tandem to say consumers expect this now, and it's only gonna continue to increase. And so do the right thing, take the time to document your your allergen and dietary information and watch your business flourish as a result um of attracting these loyal customers.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

No, that's great. Do you find that um when the menu changes, it's almost easier for people to take a look at the original menu and say, can you just leave this out instead of seeing only the ones that are available?

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Or um Yeah, not not really.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, no, it's the problem is when there's a few different ways menus can change. So a menu can change holistically seasonally, for example. So it's a whole new menu you do from scratch. Uh a recipe for a menu item can change. So last week maybe the chef met it with this extra ingredient that now he's swapping for this other ingredient. So all of a sudden, one recipe for one menu item has changed, but that could change the allergen uh makeup of that item. Similarly, when they order, when restaurants order supplies from a US foods or from a Cisco, sometimes those products at the manufacturing level change. So they swap out in the cut in the raw ingredient, you know, it had soy sauce last week, now it doesn't, or all the way around. Or sometimes the distributors run out of a certain brand. So let's say you ordered Heinz Mayonnaise, always from Cisco, and they ran out. They might just substitute in for Hellman's and not tell you. So all of a sudden, you have again a new product that's going into the recipe, that's going into the menu item, that's going to the consumer that has missed some of this allergen information. And so there's so many ways that this can change. And what we have found is that I I applaud first of all the groups who try and tackle this at all. But when you do try and do it manually and kind of like um using PDFs and spreadsheets and whatnot, it's so difficult to keep it up to date because of all those different reasons. And then it's so difficult to make sure that that updated information makes its way everywhere it needs to go, to staff, to your website, to in-venue. Uh, and so that's kind of where our approach is to be like that central source of truth that is plugged into all these different tech systems so that we know when things change in live time. So we can update the allergen information in live time and propagate it to everywhere that their menu exists. Um and increasingly as well, this is becoming a compliance issue. I'm not sure if you're across last month in California, Gavin Newsom signed the first ever piece of legislation, uh SB68, that relates to food allergies in restaurants. From one July next year, every group with 20 plus locations in the country, where at least one of them is in California, is required to label their menus, digital and physical, for the major nine food allergens. And so that is huge for the food allergy community. It means pretty much every large and medium-sized chain in the country now has to document and provide this information to consumers. So finally, we're seeing regulation catch up to what consume what's been happening in Europe for over a decade, which is transparency on allergens. And our understanding and expectation is that this is going to continue to go state by state, and then possibly at a federal level as well. So we're in a good spot. Um, we finally have some momentum.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

That's good. And then are you working with the US foods and Cisco's of the regions? Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah, so we're exactly we're plugged into the different distributors and have act yeah, and have the kind of product catalog so that we can make sure that we tie the correct skew, the product skew to the product being used in the venue.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

That's great. Thank you. Um anything else you want to touch on? I think this is really exciting for for consumers and and for people that are really trying to watch their health and wellness.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Yeah, I think it's I think the my message, as I said, uh just to kind of reiterate to consumers is that there's been a long period where this kind of community has been ignored and not uh there hasn't been positive steps forward to improve conditions and transparency. I think both in terms of technology that's now available like ours, and and there's a few other kind of different companies tackling this in different ways. But I think technology has finally enabled this to be done properly, accurately, and at scale. And I think regulation and legislators are finally understanding and realizing that their constituents need this and that it's a health and safety issue. And I think restaurants have finally seen it enough as well that they finally understand that it's not just people being annoying, it's that this is a health requirement. People need this information. And so I think the next few years is bright for this community in terms of finally getting the information that they need to make an informed dining decision. And ultimately, it's gonna be good for restaurants as well. So many of these people do not dine out today because they don't feel safe and comfortable in these environments. And as soon as this transparency comes to the fore, you're gonna see a hell of a people decide to go out more frequently and and obviously drive more revenue for the restaurants. So I think in closing, the the future is looking a lot more positive than it was a year or two ago in this space. And for anyone who um resonated with anything I said, feel free, as I said, to check out the Fudini app on any of the app stores. You can check out our website, foodini.co. You can catch me personally on LinkedIn or on other socials. Um, but yeah, always happy to talk to anyone in the community who resonates with what we're working on.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Thank you so much, John.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Not at all. Thank you for having me.