I Tried GenoPalate Nutrition: Here is My Review

When I go into the Gene Food Merchant services dashboard to review sales numbers, there are a large cluster of orders from Milwaukee, where Genopalate is headquartered.

Our product competes with Genopalate so it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that their team might buy Gene Food reports to see what a competitor is up to, especially since Gene Food is the best and most creative nutrigenomics product on the market (of course I am biased).

To be clear, I can’t say for sure whether Genopalate has ordered Gene Food, it’s just a hunch.

To return the favor, I uploaded a raw data file from 23andme to try the service. I paid $89 as part of a holiday sale, but the price is usually $159 for a raw data upload.

Female founder

Genopalate boasts an impressive team, and the business is led by a female founder, Dr. Sherry Zhang, who has extensive credentials in the industry. Dr. Zhang has done an excellent job raising significant capital to propel Genopalate to an established place in the industry.

Delays with raw data reporting

The first thing that surprised me was the flow GenoPalate uses to score raw data. In the Gene Food app, users who upload raw data receive their results via email in under 5 minutes, but with GenoPalate it takes 24 hours or more.

At Gene Food, we don’t process payment unless the user submits a raw data file that is in a format we know we can read and score. GenoPalate takes payment prior to the submission of raw data through Shopify and then requires a somewhat cumbersome account creation process to submit data. You pay, then follow prompts to upload data, and then wait another 24 hours to review the results.

For example, even after paying for my upload, before I could upload my raw data file, I was required to track down my order number and product code.

I would imagine that this flow for uploading raw data generates a lot of support tickets, especially since the results aren’t ready for some time after adding a .txt file. That, and based on my experience optimizing our support ticket process, it’s very likely that a chunk of the raw data purchasers actually don’t have the data they think they do to complete the process.

What I like about Genopalate

Genopalate has raised several rounds of funding, which has allowed their team to build an attractive user experience once logged in (the tech stack can be confusing to navigate prior to login because Shopify is the e-commerce platform).

Once you are in, the design and presentation is clean and intuitive to use. Congratulations to the front-end designer and engineer for a job well done.

Further, Genopalate has a strong commitment to privacy. I trust the platform, and believe their users can as well.

The results themselves are dead simple, and could be beneficial for the layperson who doesn’t want to “get in the weeds” with technical details and complex pathways.

What could be better

However, the simplicity of the Genopalate product is a double-edged sword.

In my view, as the founder of startup that has been in the nutrigenomics space for 7 years now, Genopalate’s results do not go into enough detail to justify the price tag for users.

The results are built around a sample food label, with recommendations for both macro and micronutrients and a handful of food sensitivities, like wheat and alcohol.

When you dig in, there isn’t a lot to sink your teeth into other than supplement recommendations, and I think that is what Genopalate ultimately has become, a tool that uses DNA to offer very basic micronutrient recommendations. Like Viome, the “sales funnel” is skewed towards buying a personalized supplement package, almost at the expense of the dietary recommendations.

The reporting largely forgoes polygenic risk scoring in favor of an emphasis on a handful of SNPs, which makes me question accuracy. For example, the folate and zinc scores are based on just one marker. Others like a fiber score, incorporate three SNPs.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is enough “meat on the bone” to make many of the calls they do, and as a user I would love to see more robust scoring and much more put into the content. With entrants like Function Health and Tony Robbin’s company, Go Life Force, the personalized health space is becoming more complex, and with the current state of the product as stripped down as it is, Genopalate could be left behind.

The bottom line

The bottom line with Genopalate is the team and dedication to privacy are top-notch, but in my view, the product itself would benefit from a more polygenic approach and a larger investment in content.