Dec 9, 2021

After Carlos Andrade survived cancer and Larissa Arias will face serious problems due to being overweight, they decided to come together to help improve the health of others. December 9, 2021 This article was translated from our Spanish edition using AI technologies. Errors may exist due to this process. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Carlos Andrade and Larissa Arias had to change their lifestyle when facing serious health problems. He survived cancer and she overcame serious effects of being overweight. Far from letting these experiences defeat them, the two Peruvian entrepreneurs launched an app to help improve other people's health. Cortesía Manzana Verde Manzana Verde seeks to facilitate the process of improving their quality of life for people who do not have the time to do it themselves. This startup joined the boom in food delivery services such as Rappi and UberEats , adding a new value to these services because in addition to bringing food to your home, it helps you eat healthy. For many people it is difficult to find the time to take care of themselves when they have to work long hours a day. Green Apple allows you to continue with your responsibilities without having to put your health aside. The application can be downloaded for free from Apple and Android . Once you enter, it asks you for certain data such as your weight, if you exercise and what your goal is to eat healthy, these reveal around how many calories you should consume per day, which are divided into five meals. Depending on when it is more difficult for you, they can send you breakfast, lunch, dinner or lunches. The entrepreneurs set up a small kitchen in Larissa's house and as such, Manzana Verde started in Piura, a city in Peru. Image: Courtesy Green Apple “We come from a city of less than 500 thousand inhabitants in Peru and we saw that there was a need and we set up the whole process that all our restaurants, our inns, our kitchens now follow. If in our small city there was an interesting market, in capitals where the problem is much greater because there is less time, people tend to be more sedentary, they tend to work more hours per day, the problem was much greater ”, Carlos commented in an interview with Entrepreneur in Spanish . Then they started sales in Lima, which is a much larger city. Seeing the success he was having, they began to wonder what the next step was. According to Carlos and Larissa, they themselves questioned whether they should continue to open in small cities and wait until they were ready to move to places with more people. Help Mexicans with a green apple Mexico is the first in the world in obesity according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and in 2019 the country ranked sixth in the world in diabetes. For the co-founders, the fact that there were more problems just meant that there were more people to help, so they decided to come straight to Mexico. "The answer we always came to was that if we are solving a problem that many people have, it is better to go first to the largest city and all the challenges that arise, learn to solve them there and be able to help many more people", explains Larissa . They put their project in an accelerator and with the money from that first investment they were able to bring their project to Mexico. The business model they work with has a great advantage, as it is flexible and scalable. Carlos and Larissa look for diners across the city where they are going to start sales. These must have the ability to generate the green apple saucers. The model favors both because Manzana Verde can meet higher demand as it grows and the inns can generate income during the pandemic. To get the restaurants, they launch a call through social networks so that interested restaurants can fill them out. There are some minimum requirements such as the size of the place and having the necessary machinery to make the Manzana Verde dishes, once they see that they comply with these, the Manzana Verde team physically visits the place. They have a special team of people who review the quality and decide if the place is suitable to meet the needs of the project. “We generate impact on users, but we also generate impact on local economies by helping the owners of these restaurants. Because keep in mind that we do not work with restaurant chains or large corporations, we work with inns. They are small businesses that even many of them are super grateful to us because during the pandemic they no longer sold anything for the rest of the day, so Manzana Verde practically supported them during the strongest peak of the pandemic ”, Carlos mentions They also offer consultation with nutritionists through video calls. This is for people who want to take their health care to a level beyond eating a certain number of calories. It is also important to note that they have a group of nutritionists within Green Apple who are the ones who create the recipes. This gives a degree of professionalism to the application and assures users that they are not putting their health at risk. Image: Courtesy Green Apple Since they opened in Mexico, they have had a sustained growth of 20% every month. The country currently accounts for 30% of all its sales and Manzana Verde's goal is for Mexico to become its main market. Its vision is to become the most guaranteed e-commerce of wellnes in Latin America in five years. The seed round of 1.5 million pesos that they have just obtained will help them meet this goal. The next step is to position itself on a larger scale in the cities where they are already located, which are Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Similarly, in the next two months they will begin operations in Puebla and Querétaro. Through social networks they have a lot of contact with users. They are the ones who ask them to take the project to their cities because it attracts their attention. They also have a section where they share the testimonials of people who used the app. Larissa tells one of the testimonies that resonated with the most: “One that comes to mind is a guy who works in financial auditing, which is usually a very complicated job in terms of hours. And he had been trying different methods to lose weight and with Green Apple he lost 21 kilos, but it was a process of 5 months. He was super grateful because thanks to Green Apple he had been able to internalize that eating healthy is not eating ugly and that a result is achieved with small actions that you change in your day to day. " Both emphasize that they seek to offer a healthy lifestyle. Green Apple is not going to put you on restrictive diets and difficult to follow and they do not promise you magical results in a week. What they are looking for is that their users can gradually acquire healthy habits through their application.