ZOE Health: Skip the hefty price tag and even heftier life admin; I’ve done it for you.
What is the reality of the programme that has taken the health-conscious world by storm?
ZOE; up until a few months ago if you’d said this word around me I’d just think you were talking about a close friend of mine.
If, like me, you fall within a demographic that is typical bait for weight loss / fitness / health / wellness / general-betterment-of-self programmes, you may also have been heavily targeted with marketing for the latest of these big-name schemes with big promises, ZOE Health. Or, perhaps you have a friend who’s tried it, or maybe you’ve even tried it yourself. Either way, ZOE seems to have become more than just another health fad. Clever partnerships have seen it leak into the everyday lives of people outside the usual target market, including gut shots at M&S, and a series of gut-loving recipes recommended by co-founder celebrity doctor, Tim Spector, for popular Instagram recipe brand, Mob Kitchen.
For those who aren’t aware of ZOE, it’s a programme that involves a series of at-home tests which produce personalised insights into your exact biology; how healthy your gut microbiome is, how well your body controls blood fat and blood sugar, as well as a diet assessment. All these results are compiled into their research bank, which means ZOE can provide unique scores on how different foods affect its users. The sheer volume of test results they have under their belt means ZOE can validate its recommendations, and continue to develop them.
Sounds pretty special doesn’t it? I was certainly drawn in to the scientific, yet uniquely personal approach this brand exudes. Having worked within healthtech for the past 4 years, and more specifically in the last 2 years for apps that provide a scoring system for users’ overall health, I was curious to understand what all the fuss was about ZOE.
Was this the answer I’d been looking for to help me finally conquer an understanding of what foods were right for me? Was there something underlying that I didn’t know about myself that’s been blocking my chances at living a healthy lifestyle?
There was only one way to find out…
Sign up process
Signing up to ZOE Health isn’t a quick process. I was asked everything about my general health, measurements, health goals, hunger, and pre-existing conditions.
Peppered throughout these questions were interesting tidbits of scientific information, statistics from other ZOE members, and predictions about my health, which — subconscious or not — made me feel that I too wanted to be a part of the ZOE community.
This was also the stage where ZOE first began talking about weight, while insisting this wasn’t a diet plan. I was given comparisons of how much weight had been lost by people with similar answers to mine, as well as statistics of how sustainable ZOE members find the programme to be. My favourite statistic was this:
“85% chance that cheese is a more satisfying snack for you than a banana”
As a sucker for cheese, they knew how to get me!
It’s fair to say by the end of the sign up process, having sacrificed the best part of an hour of my life, I was ready to become a ZOE member and reap all the benefits they’d lured me in with. This was almost enough to get me to glaze over the final price, which was premium (to say the least).
The tests, plus a 4-month subscription, came to a grand total of £468.95. Ouch! However, in the name of research, I swallowed my pride and continued on to the waitlist…
Testing period
Unboxing
A month or so later I got the email to say I was off the waiting list and my tests would soon be delivered. I was also invited to download the ZOE app and log in, where I could complete lessons in preparation for my kit to arrive.
The delivery date finally arrived and I was so eager to collect my package from the post office that I narrowly avoided a parking ticket…
Unboxing the ZOE test kit was quite the experience. It was very obvious this was a premium product — rightly so as this was the first tangible part of the process after paying an extortionate amount. Everything had been considered, from instructions on the boxes, to messages underneath the strip opening, and even a sticker telling me who had packed my kit! Every aspect fed into their USP of being a personal brand.
My first task was to apply the blood glucose monitor. Although the steps were all in a flyer that came with my kit, ZOE also uses a lot of videos to explain these steps, so it’s really easy to follow. In fact, the application of the blood glucose monitor was much easier and less painful than I’d imagined, and once I’d downloaded a partnered app, LibreLink, I was all set to measure my blood glucose for the next couple of weeks.
The only slight issue with this was that I was required to scan the monitor with my phone every 8 hours, or lose the data since my last scan. As a result, for the next couple of weeks I experienced the feeling of having an important alarm I desperately didn’t want to sleep through, causing a broken, anxious sleep instead. Slightly annoying… And probably not great for my health either!
Test Day
The following day was my test day. This was my first real experience of feeling overwhelmed with ZOE. There is a very strict schedule that must be followed in order to ensure all the below tests are completed correctly:
- Gut microbiome test, involving fasting for 8 hours and eating a specially designed breakfast cookie, and then fasting for another 4 hours and eating the famous blue lunch cookie.
- Blood test, which was to be completed a specific number of hours after the cookies.
- Gut health test, which — without sharing finer details — involved a sample, and looking out for evidence of the blue cookie over the following few days.
I was able to work from home on this day, but found it difficult to arrange around a full day of usability testing. I couldn’t help wondering how anyone that works shifts or has childcare responsibilities might juggle their test day.
Testing period
The rest of the two-week testing period required me to log meals and continue scanning my blood glucose monitor in order for ZOE to understand how my body reacts to different foods. I’ve used various food logging apps before, and in some ways ZOE’s is head and shoulders above others — particularly with it’s AI generator, where you can type in a meal and it predicts the ingredients involved. Paired with barcode scanners to help with shop-bought items, it’s a fairly decent feature, if a little clunky.
However, at the end of the day, nothing takes the joy out of eating more than having to ensure every ingredient and item is tracked. Yet, at least this was just for the short term — or so I thought. More on that later…
I was also given a series of challenges over 5 days, which involved fasting for 8 hours, completing the below tasks, and then fasting again for 4 hours after:
- Day 4: Eat a plain bagel
- Day 5: Eat 3 tbsp of peanut butter
- Day 6: Eat a plain bagel with 3 tbsp of butter
- Day 7: Eat a plain bagel and then do 30 mins exercise straight afterwards
- Day 8: Eat 3 tbsp of peanut butter followed by a plain bagel 10 minutes later
I did see differences in these challenges, particularly the effect 30 minutes of exercise after eating had on stabilising my blood sugar, but it was another element that took a fair amount of planning. At this point I was a bit fatigued by the amount of work involved, but the promise of my results and getting the secrets to knowing the foods that work for me was enough to keep me motivated.
Another timely task was the multiple lessons and questionnaires I was asked to complete each day, which could take anything from 2 minutes, up to half an hour each! Needless to say, this programme isn’t for the faint hearted.
Results
The day I’d been waiting for! So… Did it meet expectations? Well, it’s hard to say.
My blood sugar control, blood fat control, and gut microbiome were all scored ‘Excellent’, and my diet was scored ‘Good’. So, no underlying conditions to worry about; “what a relief!”, I thought. But in terms of the money I’d spent, the question was now — how can ZOE help me improve? By their standards, I was doing pretty well, so where does that leave users like me?
The answer, I believe, was in the personal food scores, which take into account the effects of all kinds of food on the three focus areas; blood sugar, blood fat, and gut health. While I didn’t get my dream result of 100/100 for spaghetti carbonara, Haribo Starmix, and thick white toast with lashings of butter, the results were still intriguing to me. There weren’t many surprises, but I did learn that plums and peaches were the best fruits for me, with green beans, mushrooms, sweet potato and a few different varieties of fish also scoring high. On the other hand, cornflakes, cheese burgers, and — much to my dismay — Danish pastries, were all “gut suppressors”.
I was also invited to “meet” my gut microbiomes, of which I had 34 out of 50 good, and 6 out of 50 bad. Each of these microbiomes was named and given a percentage, yet there was no information about what each of them were for or what the percentage meant. So, ultimately, these were just strange words with a meaningless number attached.
Each of these elements of my results now fed into the remaining content of the app. The food logging feature now produced scores for meals and food combinations, in-app recipes were given a score, and I could filter recipes based on my gut boosters. This set me up for the next stage of the ZOE process, the ongoing tracking period.
Post-results period
While the long-term goal of using ZOE is to improve your health and longevity, ZOE manages to drive short-term motivation by encouraging users to reach a ZOE score of 50 each day, with an underlying aim to eat 30 plants (fruit, veg, pulses, grains, etc.) per week. This, as it turns out is much harder than expected.
Tracking; food logging and reflection
I made effort to introduce more plants into my diet, particularly beans and pulses as I’d been lacking these the most beforehand. I was as honest with the app as I possible could be, and dedicated more time than I desired to logging all my food at the correct times.
At the end of each day I was asked to “reflect on my biology”. Now, this feature opened with questions that are good indicators of how well someone has eaten over the previous few days; hunger, toilet trips, and energy. Nothing unexpected there.
However, these questions descended into asking about weight, waist and hip measurements. Despite a disclaimer that these were optional, and weight was only needed once a week, I felt this was an ignorance to their duty of care.
As someone who has avoided weighing myself over the past few years, and has explored body positivity in aspects other than my weight, it was irritating to have this prompt on a daily basis. Particularly after so much messaging throughout the programme that ZOE is not a weight loss app and does not support concepts such as calorie counting.
Being asked about my weight, and seeing content that referred to my weight so often was especially odd to me later, when the app asked me how stepping on the scale makes me feel, to which I answered “frustrated”, “overwhelmed”, and “anxious”. Clearly, the people behind the app understand the sensitive nature of weight, but the empathetic side of this was presented a little too late in the journey.
I started to wonder what was the difference from a mental perspective between calorie counting and ‘gut health counting’. Either way, I was logging my food, thinking about my weight, and not actually feeling great about it.
Content; habit building, lessons and more
From time to time, ZOE would introduce different behavioural change techniques — these are methods used by psychologists to support people with making changes in their life, often utilised by health psychologists. ZOE asked me to complete tasks including finding my “ultimate why”, setting a “tiny habit”, and eating intuitively by “listening to my hunger”. These are all great concepts, yet ZOE’s execution was disappointing. The theories were introduced, sometimes I would complete an exercise to tick off in the app, and then, nothing. These concepts were never mentioned again. Rather than picking one tactic to support habit building, and really utilising it, ZOE seemed to throw as many as possible at me with the hope one would stick. As a result, none of them did.
Alongside this, the list of lessons, questionnaires and other tasks continued to grow, while the variety of video content, podcast episodes, recipes and health articles refreshed on a daily basis. I quickly realised there was absolutely no way I could absorb even half of the content I was given each day without packing in my job and becoming a full-time ZOE member.
At what should have been my period of peak motivation, i.e. in the first few weeks after getting my results, I was scoring an average of just 40 each week. This was despite prompts, lessons and weekly progress reports. I felt the lower scoring foods had more influence over my overall ZOE scores than the higher scoring foods, and so a treat or two a week would pull the whole thing down. This was a big barrier to keeping me motivated.
So, what’s the verdict?
Despite a burning curiosity that kept me going throughout the admin to get my results, I quickly grew tired of logging my food and making effort to change my diet without seeing the improvements I expected. The whole experience at this point felt overwhelming.
Usability
It’s clear a lot has gone into the app and the onboarding experience. The experience of logging food is the most modern I’ve seen with it’s AI capabilities, yet despite the obvious effort put into making it as easy as possible, the experience is still clunky. I’m not sure I believe any app can create a food logging experience that isn’t time consuming and, at times, inaccurate.
Outside of the tracking element, the usability of the app is generally pretty good. It’s easy to navigate, the reporting is useful and informative, and the UI looks good, if a little uninspiring at times.
The more difficult side of ZOE’s usability comes from outside of the app, during the testing period. While the app provides a useful, prescriptive, timeline for completing tests and blood glucose challenges, it falls short when considering how people can actually fit this into their lives. I am a woman in my late 20s, no kids, living in a rented flat, and working from an office a short stroll from home, yet I struggled to fit in all the tasks required of me into my day at the correct times. I have no idea how anyone with more responsibilities, such as children, shift work, or elderly parents, would be able to achieve everything required.
Weight loss
Weight is a very contentious topic, and ZOE makes some attempt to tackle this. They provide empathetic messages that show there has been consideration of the sensitive nature of tracking weight, but there are holes in this approach too.
During onboarding, there are a lot of questions about weight, weight goals, timeline to lose weight, graphs to show how ZOE users lose weight more sustainably than dieters, all the while insisting that this isn’t what ZOE is about. Further down the line, despite having selected “frustrated”, “overwhelmed” and “anxious”, when ZOE asked me how I feel when I weighed myself, the app had already prompted me every single day to weigh myself as part of the daily reflection. The empathetic tone comes later in the journey, and while welcome, it just feels too little too late. By this point, I had already gone against my own values and weighed myself and had returned to a place of feeling pretty rubbish about my body — something I’d worked hard to overcome in the previous few years. I can’t blame ZOE for that — I knew the risks to my mental health of stepping on the scales — but, given the creators of this app clearly understand the delicate nature of weight, I wish they’d put some more thought into the order in which these messages are delivered to the end-user.
The mixed messaging that sometimes indicates ZOE isn’t a weight-loss app, versus the persistent questions and reference to weight, leaves me with a bad taste. The weight loss market is a relatively easy sale — it’s a tried and tested audience who will typically give money to anything that promises a size 8 skirt and no lumps, bumps or jiggles in a bikini. I know this because I’ve been there. What ZOE is fundamentally about is a much trickier sell; gut health is still a fairly new concept to the mainstream so requires a great deal of education on not only the benefits, but also the mechanisms behind it. It’s about giving power to a part of our bodies that more research is starting to indicate has a big impact on our overall health, and weight loss may be an outcome of a change in attitude towards food. But then again, it may not. With this in mind, ZOE seems to pick and choose when it taps into the weight loss angle, particularly during onboarding when aiming to drive users through the bottom of the funnel. It’s a quicker, cheaper, sell than the benefits of long-term gut health, and the close links both weight loss, and gut health, have with what we eat means ZOE can get away with advertising to the same market, using some of the methods they have been shown to respond to.
Habit building
This is where ZOE really falls short. The approach is far too hard, far too quickly, in terms of the information provided and the behavioural change techniques they introduce. The daily lessons and questionnaires aimed at teaching users about various aspects of reaching a healthy gut microbiome, and therefore good chances at longevity, are helpful on an individual basis, but overwhelming in full force. It feels like quantity over quality, particularly where some concepts would benefit from being added to the daily task list as a reminder. In reality, so much is lost to the masses of lessons completed (or not) in the app.
This is also reflected in what you’re asked to do in terms of the foods you should focus on. Reaching a daily score of 50+ is quite a challenge for a starter, especially when there isn’t much mention of how to do this in scenarios where you have less control over what you’re eating, or where you’re out socialising.
I think I would have found ZOE much more effective in helping me build sustainable habits if methods, theories, and challenges were introduced more gradually, and done properly. Like many people, I need reminding to put something into place, and I need achievable goals that I can build on. Although ZOE explains they do take things gradually, perhaps they need to adjust the starting point to users’ preferences. It’s better to do one thing well than lots of things half heartedly, and that’s where I think ZOE currently is.
Personalised insights
ZOE’s real USP is the personalised insights that are delivered as a result of the testing period. For me, this is where the value lies. Being able to see exactly how different foods will impact you — not only in terms of gut health but also blood sugar and blood fat — and being able to see the impact of combining different foods to help balance out lower scoring foods is really unique, and is the epitome of personalisation.
Personally, this wasn’t enough to keep me drawn in long term to ZOE, my issues around tracking my food outweighed the benefit I was getting from knowing the impact of food on my gut health, blood sugar and blood fat. This is, in part, due to the results of my tests; I scored ‘Excellent’ in all three of these areas, and ‘Good’ in diet, so I didn’t feel there was much for me to work towards or improve on. I have since introduced more vegetables and pulses into my diet, but that isn’t something I believe I could have achieved from ZOE alone. I do have the relief that my health is in good shape, but unfortunately the user experience for someone in this category isn’t powerful enough, or easy enough to incorporate into my life, to warrant continuous use of the app.
Closing thoughts
ZOE is a fantastic concept. Although I’ve been fairly critical, I wouldn’t want this to be mistaken for me being unimpressed by what the brand has achieved and the potential it has. It’s managed to position itself as a real differentiator in a saturated market, with a genuine USP and an unmatched research base. The possibilities of what it can become with the foundations is has built are exciting, but to get there, there are elements of the user experience that need serious work. Particularly to keep its premium price point and to retain its users.
I’m not the only one that thinks this either. Having spoken to various other ZOE members, I heard reviews much like the following:
“There’s so much info, you have to be tapped in all the time. It’s rather faffy as well with the tests. I’m hoping it’s worth the money.”
Similarly, in response to a recent Linkedin post from Jonathan Woolf, ZOE’s Co-founder and CEO, announcing redundancies after a period of high growth, the comments were flooded with feedback about the recurring subscription cost. Even investors were airing their disapproval of the pricing model, which — at around £40 per month— is simply deemed too much for the ongoing benefits of food logging and recipes. The result is churn, and little loyalty.
I hope ZOE can sort out these issues. It’s a brand that has proven a mass market for gut-related health improvements, and its bank of data means it is in a powerful position to actually do what it sets out to achieve: personalise its members’ health journeys, while deepening the research findings that can benefit the wider system. What a shame it would be to see all of that potential meet the same fate as countless other healthtech startups.
