Meal delivery service sets nutritional limits

A new food delivery service has hit the mobile app stand with a mission to make takeout healthier.

Called Zesty, the service offers a list of dishes from a select few restaurants around San Francisco that meet a set of nutritional requirements. Dishes contain no MSG or added sugar and use limited amounts of oil, butter, salt and other ingredients deemed unhealthy by the company’s in-house nutritionist.

The idea, said founder David Langer, “is to convert your local Chinese and other restaurants into suppliers of healthy food by enforcing special cooking instructions.”

To ensure quality standards are met, the company’s four employees regularly sample dishes from all the restaurants, Langer said.

Also, the app has a rating system that allows users to give the food one to five stars based on quality, healthfulness and delivery time. Therefore, restaurants with consistently low ratings or too many complaints get the boot.

So far, 35 restaurants have agreed to partner with the company and abide by its stringent standards, Langer said. And those with popular dishes have experienced double the order frequency of other food delivery services such as Grub Hub, Seamless and Eat24.

“That’s because this is something that can be part of your lifestyle and not feel guilty about,” Langer said.

So, will burgers or pizza ever appear on Zesty’s menu? It depends, Langer said. All those dishes would have to be made in a way at appears healthy, like a burger made with high-quality beef in a lettuce wrap instead of a bun or a pizza with a thin, gluten-free crust.

How about fried chicken? “Yeah, no. It would have to be grilled,” Langer said. “If there are too many things that are too counter-intuitive for you to think it’s healthy, you’ll likely stop using the app.”

Fair enough.

To make the selection even easier for the health conscious, users can sort through the available dishes with a number of filters, such as low carb, low calorie or high protein. The service is free to use and most restaurants don’t charge a delivery fee.

“We want the experience of Zesty to be like walking into Whole Foods,” Langer said. “People there feel like they’re going to make good decisions because Whole Foods has already done the work to curate a healthy selection of foods.”

While Zesty seems to be garnering quite a bit of attention in the food world, not all restaurants want to work with the service. That’s because some already have a high volume of orders, while others don’t want to comply with Zesty’s requirements to modify their dishes.

Langer said he doesn’t fear this will hinder the company’s ability to scale its service to other cities, as there are plenty of restaurants that could benefit from a few more orders every month.

“There’s a real tangible benefit,” he said.