Former elite athlete Mike Rudling is on a mission to get healthier food to the masses.
The 36-year old has spent the last 12 years developing nutritionally balanced meals and protein powders via his company Radix.
Made using a variety of processes including freeze-drying, pressing and spray-drying, Radix’s meals are ready to eat after hot water is added to reconstitute the food.
Initially focused on selling Radix products to Olympic athletes and other top sportsmen and women, Rudling has just secured a deal to distribute them through Rebel Sport.
Radix will also double the number of Foodstuffs North Island supermarkets it sells in this year. It’s currently stocked in 28 supermarkets.
“There’s this huge gap between what is known technically and scientifically around what a person should have in their diet for optimum health, and then where this food industry actually performs as one of the world’s largest industries,” Rudling said.
“It is, unfortunately, the mainstream food in a heavily processed food industry which is having such destructive effects on people’s health.”
Rudling knows what’s needed for a healthy diet – the former elite swimmer and cyclist spent years on an intense diet regime to stay at the top of his game.
With all that time spent studying the human body and what it needed to thrive, Rudling couldn’t help but think about the issues facing the mainstream population, who had no access to the knowledge he could obtain.
“I’m frustrated about the global food industry over the last 40 years. In the 1970s, the food industry started to just be entertainment-focused. What new exciting colours can we bring out, what flavours can we bring out?
“At that time there was this amazing amount of scientific knowledge being created around how the human body works. The food industry has just diverged from that and then 30-40 years later we find out that it’s caused a lot of harm.”
Rudling said the rise of foods high in sugar, additives, preservatives and chemicals has come at the cost of information, and that most people don’t really understand what those substances do.
Radix’s products are natural, with no artificial ingredients.
Rudling said Radix and the wider health-food industry are working towards the concept of personalised nutrition, which aims to provide healthy eating advice that is tailor-made, based on the nutritional needs of each individual rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Although making individualised products isn’t currently feasible, Radix is making its products using data from global studies to get as close as possible.
“We have the ability to be state-of-the-art in nutrition design using some of the world’s leading scientific data sets. Our data set at the moment is coming up to 34 million distinct nutritional values across nearly 3.5 million food and ingredients from around the world.
“Using some of the world’s leading nutritional and scientific ingredient studies, we bring that together in very large nutrient models to design state-of-the-art products.”
Originating in a garage, Radix initially scaled up to a development site in South Auckland that was just a few hundred square metres.
The business now operates out of a purpose-built facility in Hamilton that is 45 times bigger, with the ability to scale up to 150 times its current capacity.
A lot of effort goes into research and development: Rudling says the Radix team have progressed through 10 iterations of its product range over the past eight years as they increase the nutritional value while driving down the cost.
And it’s just the start thanks to artificial intelligence, which Rudling said they’ve been dreaming about for years.
“If you met with the typical person in the industry, you would have the sum total of their industry’s knowledge.
“Now we’re able to query and use that technology to drive designs over 30 to 40 million nutrient parameters. We’re able to do that in seconds, so we’re able to do that hundreds of times a day.”
One example where technology has proved useful is in the development of Radix’s new Whey Protein product, which was made possible by a relationship the business has with Fonterra’s research and development centre.
Radix and Fonterra worked together to design the protein powder, which targets the scientific metric for bioavailability known as DIAAS, or digestible indispensable amino acid score.
DIAAS is considered the most accurate method for determining protein quality and is recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Radix claims its Whey Protein product has a higher DIAAS score than any other option on the market.
Rudling said that in order to go through a large number of amino acid profiles and compute different costs, sensory performances, flavours and the availability in the supply chain, it would take the team months – sometimes even using spreadsheets.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, the team can now compute several hundreds of thousands of profiles in just a few seconds.
Rudling has big expansion plans on his radar, including a goal to be 10 times larger in five years’ time.
“It’s a huge industry, you’re talking about multibillion-dollar industries, and if we get even a tiny percentage of market share on that, we should be growing very quickly.”
He’d like the business to become a global company, replicating its technology and manufacturing capabilities across Australasia and eventually around the world.
Rudling confirmed the business is earning “high single-digit millions” in revenue each year, and has a goal to be earning over $100 million within the next few years.
“We want to get to the point where if someone wants to change their diet, change their health, they can begin eventually anywhere in the world with that product turning up on their doorstep next day.
“We think we can give someone the healthiest breakfast in the world for the price of a cup of coffee.”
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.