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What The Food? Gousto launches AI tool to decode confusing food ingredients! Ever looked at the back of a food packet and wondered what on earth half of the ingredients actually are? Gousto has launched a new AI-powered tool designed to make those confusing food labels easier to understand - with a little help from comedian Katherine Ryan. Verge Magazine Ltd has all been there. You're standing in the supermarket, checking the ingredients on a packet, only to find yourself confronted with a list of chemical-sounding names that seem to require a degree in food science to understand. Now, new research commissioned by recipe box brand Gousto suggests that plenty of Brits are just as confused, with one in three UK adults (33%) admitting they wouldn't be able to explain some of the ingredient names found in everyday foods. To help shoppers make sense of what they're actually buying, Gousto has launched What The Food, an AI-powered digital tool that translates more than 100 of the UK's most commonly misunderstood food ingredients into simple language. And yes, it has been given the rather fitting acronym WTF. What is Gousto's What The Food tool? The new What-The-Food.co.uk tool has been designed to help shoppers decode unfamiliar ingredients while they're actually out shopping. Users can search for ingredients they don't recognise and receive a straightforward explanation of what they are, what they do and why they might appear in particular foods. The tool also features translations from comedian Katherine Ryan and registered nutritionist Rob Hobson, combining nutritional information with a more humorous take on some of the baffling terminology found on food packaging. The idea is simple: rather than staring at an ingredient list wondering whether you've accidentally picked up a chemistry textbook, shoppers can use the AI-powered tool to get an explanation in everyday language. One in three Brits don't understand food ingredients. According to research commissioned by Gousto, 33% of UK adults say they wouldn't be able to explain some of the ingredient names found in everyday foods. For some shoppers, the confusion has gone even further. The research found that 21% have simply given up trying to understand ingredient lists altogether, while one in five (20%) say they have decided not to buy a product because they didn't understand its ingredients. At the same time, almost a quarter (24%) admit they have bought products without knowing exactly what was in them. The research also found that Brits spend more than one hour and 20 minutes every month trying to work out food ingredients while doing their shopping. With food labels often packed with unfamiliar terminology, Gousto says What The Food is intended to make understanding ingredients less intimidating. Katherine Ryan gives food labels a makeover. Comedian Katherine Ryan is lending her distinctive sense of humour to the project, offering tongue-in-cheek translations alongside the more straightforward explanations. One example is acetic acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids - an ingredient that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. The ingredient can be used as an emulsifier in foods including bread, cakes and pastries. It helps ingredients such as fat and water stay mixed, while also helping improve texture and keeping baked goods softer for longer. But rather than forcing shoppers to decipher the scientific terminology themselves, What The Food gives the ingredient a much simpler explanation. Katherine Ryan's translation jokes: "By the time you've finished reading that, you could've baked the cake yourself." The tool then explains that it is an emulsifier used to help ingredients mix and improve texture. Speaking about the project, Ryan said the confusion surrounding food labels is something she can relate to, particularly when faced with lengthy ingredient names. She added that the aim is to help people feel more confident about what they're eating while giving them a laugh along the way. Rob Hobson: it's about understanding, not labelling ingredients 'good' or 'bad' Registered nutritionist Rob Hobson has also been involved with the project, helping to provide clearer explanations of the ingredients featured on the platform. Importantly, the project isn't designed to tell shoppers that individual ingredients are automatically good or bad. Instead, the focus is on helping people understand what an ingredient actually is and what purpose it serves in food. That distinction could be particularly useful for shoppers who encounter unfamiliar names and immediately assume that something must be unhealthy simply because it sounds scientific. As Hobson explained, understanding what's in its food can help people make more informed choices. The AI food scanner is designed for supermarket trips. One of the key features of What-The-Food.co.uk is its AI-powered scanner extension. Rather than manually typing out a lengthy ingredient name, shoppers can use the tool to scan the back of a food packet while they're in the supermarket. The tool then provides an explanation of the ingredients, making it possible to get more information without having to spend ages searching the internet. It's essentially designed to be a quick companion for anyone who has ever stood in the middle of a supermarket aisle thinking: "What does that actually mean?" Gousto wants food labels to be easier to understand. The launch comes as many people are looking to make changes to their eating habits. Gousto's research found that 74% of Brits are trying to make healthier food choices, while 27% see autumn as a time to reset their health routines ahead of winter. Gousto founder and CEO Timo Boldt says the new tool is about making food information more accessible without requiring shoppers to have specialist knowledge. The company hopes that translating complicated terminology into "normal human language" can make it easier for people to understand what they're putting into their shopping baskets. What does What The Food actually explain? The tool currently covers 101 of the UK's most commonly misunderstood ingredients, with explanations designed to be quick and easy to understand. That means shoppers can look up everything from unfamiliar additives and emulsifiers to other ingredients commonly found on packaged foods. Rather than automatically judging an ingredient based on its name, the tool provides context about what it is and what role it plays in a product. For anyone who has ever abandoned an ingredient list halfway through reading it, that could make supermarket shopping a little less confusing. Try Gousto's What The Food tool. Whether you're curious about the ingredients in your favourite snacks, want to understand what you're buying during your next supermarket trip, or simply want to know what some of those impossibly long ingredient names actually mean, Gousto's new tool is designed to help. You can explore What The Food and start decoding the ingredients hiding in your food.

Meal kit meltdown: what Blue Apron's empty boxes teach every business about renting its backbone. American meal-kit customers are opening boxes with most of the dinner missing, because the one company that packed them went bust. British boxes keep arriving full, and the reason why is the most useful supply chain lesson a small business will read this year. Imagine paying for a week of dinners and opening the box to find most of the ingredients missing. That was the Blue Apron experience for American households last month. Customers of the meal-kit brand have reported missing ingredients, damaged and opened items, late deliveries and cancelled orders, and so many complaints that the company's main phone line was taken out of service. Blue Apron's own apology, posted to its social channels in mid August, did not attempt a brave face: "to say that it has not gone smoothly would be an understatement." Nothing went wrong with Blue Apron's recipes, its brand or its customers' appetite. What failed was a company most of those customers had never heard of. The story of how one supplier's bankruptcy emptied another company's boxes is the cleanest lesson in dependency risk Primo Interactive Limited has seen in years, and it has a very British twist: over here, the boxes are still arriving full. How to lose your kitchen without noticing. Blue Apron more or less invented the American meal kit, and in 2017 it floated at a valuation near $1.9bn. Six years and a long decline later it was bought by food-delivery firm Wonder for about $103m, roughly a twentieth of its IPO price. Along the way it made the decision that matters to this story: in 2023 it sold its packing and fulfilment infrastructure to a company called FreshRealm and became "asset-light", a brand and a website with a ten-year contract where its kitchens used to be. Marley Spoon, another meal-kit operator, did a version of the same deal in 2024. Asset-light works beautifully until the asset-heavy partner stumbles. In 2025, FreshRealm's prepared pasta meals were linked to a deadly listeria outbreak that led to a recall of ready meals sold in Walmart and Kroger. In January 2026 Walmart, which accounted for over a fifth of FreshRealm's revenue, walked away. Blue Apron was disputing the supply contract by then too. In April, FreshRealm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with roughly a thousand jobs reported lost. Marley Spoon warned its investors the collapse could do serious damage to its revenue and earnings. When your sole supplier files for bankruptcy, its problems become your problems at the speed of the next delivery cycle. The rescue only sharpened the lesson. Misfits Market, a grocery firm, took over the Blue Apron fulfilment business out of the bankruptcy, for a reported single dollar, and then had to rebuild in ten weeks a packing operation that would normally take a year to stand up, using inventory records from the insolvency that did not match what was on the shelves. "The transition involved standing up an entirely new fulfillment operation on a dramatically compressed timeline," a Misfits spokesperson told SFGate. Every missing bag of noodles in an American kitchen this month is that sentence made visible. Why the British boxes still arrive full. The UK recipe-box market is worth around £1bn a year and forecast to double by 2030, dominated by HelloFresh and Gousto. Neither rents its backbone. Gousto, the UK's own meal-kit unicorn, builds and runs its own automated factories, and has just posted a third consecutive profitable year on £342m of sales. HelloFresh assembles its UK kits in-house, and in 2024 opened its largest European production site in Derby. Owning the machinery looked like the expensive, unfashionable choice through the years when analysts rewarded asset-light everything. This month it is the reason Gousto's customers are still getting dinner. Britain has no cause for smugness, because Primo Interactive Limited ran this experiment ourselves in 2018. KFC moved its chicken distribution from a specialist with six warehouses to a single DHL depot in Rugby, with no overlap period. Within days most of its 900 UK restaurants had closed for lack of chicken, the country briefly lost its mind, and within a month KFC had quietly handed part of the contract back to the old supplier. Same anatomy: a single point of failure, no transition margin, and the customer-facing brand taking all the reputational damage for an invisible partner's failure. The audit worth doing before your version of this. Few small businesses run fulfilment centres, but nearly all of them have quietly gone asset-light in ways they have stopped noticing. Your card processor, your booking system, your email provider, your hosting, your one courier, your one wholesaler, the one freelancer who knows how the website works: each is a FreshRealm, a company whose bankruptcy, price rise or bad quarter becomes your empty box. The pattern Primo Interactive Limited wrote about when the logistics industry admitted turbulence is permanent applies one layer down, to the suppliers behind your own promises. Three questions turn the meal-kit mess into something useful. First, which single supplier could stop you trading tomorrow, and would you find out from them or from your customers? Blue Apron's customers found out first, and that is the expensive way round. Second, what is your transition time? KFC's disaster was not choosing DHL, it was allowing zero weeks of overlap; Misfits Market needed a year and got ten. If switching any supplier that matters would take you months, you need the spare relationship before the emergency, not during it. Third, which failures will carry your name? Nobody tweeted at FreshRealm. The brand on the box absorbs every failure in the chain behind it, which is the strongest argument for owning, or at least controlling, the parts of the chain your customers actually feel. For most firms Primo Interactive Limited work with, the customer-facing backbone is digital: the website, the enquiry route, the booking flow. It deserves the Gousto treatment, owned, understood and under your control, not the Blue Apron treatment, rented from a party you could not replace in a fortnight. If you are not sure which one you have got, book a free call and Primo Interactive Limited will help you map where your single points of failure are. Liked this? Get the next one by email. One email a fortnight on web design, SEO and what is actually working online. 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