PORTLAND, Maine — Cheryl Phillips-Day was looking for her next professional venture, while also undertaking a bit of a dietary overhaul.
While seemingly unrelated at first glance, the overlap of the two led to the creation of the Greenestbeans.com, an online database that allows shoppers to search for food or other products that meet a range of dietary needs.
“You can tell me you’re looking for cereals that are non-GMO and you live in the New England region, and we’ll tell you what options are available,” Phillips-Day said. “You could say, ‘non-GMO and dye free,’ and we’d give that to you, or you could say, ‘organic’ and we’d give that to you.”
It began about five years ago when Phillips-Day’s mother began showing signs of dementia, and she would later be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“My mother was very healthy, very active, very engaged with her kids and there was no family history of dementia,” she recalled.
Over the following years, Phillips-Day, who had a successful stint with the computer maker Compaq before going on to help launch and manage a series of technology startups, took a critical look at her eating habits.
With the family history being rewritten to include a chapter on Alzheimer’s, Phillips-Day read about life changes to prevent or slow the onset of the disease, and began reducing simple carbohydrates in her diet.
She cut out many processed foods, grew produce on her Kennebunk property and shopped with other local farmers for organic options as well.
Come late spring of this year, when Phillips-Day prepared to search for her next startup venture, food choices were at the front of her mind.
“I started talking to people about food,” she said. “Everyone I talked to had some cause of concern over food.”
Phillips-Day said over the course of just a few weeks, she spoke with nearly 50 friends, colleagues, family members and acquaintances about their diets, and everyone opened up about a frustrating dietary need, like a child’s allergy or a concern about gluten.
“I’d say, ‘How do you find what you need?’ And they’d say, ‘I go to the store with good intentions, but it’s hectic, the kids are running around and I’m pressed for time, so I just end up throwing stuff into the cart and going home and feeling like a failure,’” she recalled.
Phillips-Day took her research to the next level by posting a nine-question survey online, and through just a few social media shares, enjoyed a small viral burst. Ultimately more than 800 people responsed — most of whom were strangers and about a third of whom felt strongly enough about food choices they left their email addresses for future correspondences about the subject.
“With most of these people I have no idea how they found the survey,” she said. “Eighty-seven percent were avoiding one food attribute, many of them two.”
And as she had discovered from her time trying to change her diet, it’s a challenge to come up with a shopping list that meets one, two or three different dietary needs.
So Phillips-Day assembled a team of programmers, designers and marketers from her network of tech connections, and the effort to produce a sortable Internet database of food products began.
Now Greenestbeans.com is live, and the team is working to add more products to the database. Phillips-Day said the website will seek to generate revenue by charging food producers subscriptions — based on the sizes of the operations and the number of food products to be listed.
She said many consumers tune out online and television advertisements, but will come to Greenestbeans.com to search precisely for what food products they’re interested in buying.
“It’s one of the places you can go in the grocery world where you can connect with people looking for exactly what you’re offering,” she said. “It is the new model of consumer behavior. I don’t see that changing.”
