I'm a dad of three, with a full-time job, and for a long time I'd had a nagging sense that something about modern food wasn't right - I just couldn't put my finger on it.
So I started reading, and digging into it properly. The more I learned, the clearer the picture got: over the last century, we've drifted further and further from real, traditional whole foods toward cheap, ultra-processed alternatives - driven by industrial-scale agriculture, decades of government dietary guidelines, and 20th-century nutrition science that steered us away from the way people had eaten for generations. That was the eye-opener. It turned a vague concern into something I actually wanted to act on, and I started making real changes to how my family and I ate.
But knowing all this and acting on it in a supermarket are two different things. You're stood in the aisle squinting at the back of a packet, trying to make sense of a nutrition label and an ingredients list as long as your arm. Nobody's got time for that on a weekly shop.
So I built a tool to do it for me. For my family, my kitchen, my actual weekly shop. And it earned its keep almost straight away.
📦 The First Test
A Sainsbury's delivery was due one Sunday afternoon. That morning I imported the order into NYAM before it arrived - and honestly, it stopped me in my tracks. The worst offenders were right there in black and white. When the driver turned up, I sent a few things straight back. We were eating better before the shopping had even made it through the front door.
A few days later I was in London for work and walked into a Waitrose. I reached for the same sandwich I'd grabbed a hundred times without a second thought - but this time I scanned it first. The score stopped me. So I scanned a few alternatives, and the best one went in the bag instead.
Standing in that aisle, it clicked: this isn't just useful for me.
🌍 The Mission
Anyone could use this. Every parent trying to do right by their kids, every person who's ever picked up a product and thought "but what's actually in this?" - they all deserve a straight answer, without needing a nutrition degree to get one.
That's when it stopped being a personal project. I founded NYAM App Ltd - my first ever business - and worked early mornings, late nights, and most weekends around my job and the kids to turn it into something real.
Scan a single barcode in the cereal aisle, check your whole basket before you hit confirm on an online shop, or score a full week's shopping in seconds. The point is the same: honest information about your food, made simple, and yours.
Your food. Your priorities. Your score.
Tyrone Tapper
Founder, NYAM App Ltd
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