A Letter to Vitalcart’s Founding Engineer

After Adaobi Kanu was diagnosed with an iron deficiency about two years ago, she had to quickly learn how to manage everything that she ate. From researching iron-rich vegetables to examining nutrition labels on packaged items, she realized just how hard it is to make informed decisions about what to buy and eat.

Inspired by this mission to make healthy eating easier every day, Adaobi founded Vitalcart in early 2021 as part of a Founder-in-Residence program in Launchpad, M13’s venture studio. With sponsorship from PepsiCo, the virtual program enabled talented operators with entrepreneurial agility and DTC expertise to develop and market test new product concepts and secure seed funding in just 12 weeks.

While our expectations for this program were high, the potential for broad consumer impact from the mission-driven solutions that were developed has exceeded even our loftiest of goals. Through Adaobi’s leadership, Vitalcart exemplifies our mission-driven, consumer-focused approach to company building.

Grocery delivery is by no means a novel trend, with platforms like Instacart enabling new ways to shop for the better part of the last decade. Supercharged by the pandemic, online grocery is now projected to reach $86 billion globally by 2025, still only a fraction (11%) of the total market. While the benefits of online grocery shopping are clear—notably time savings and accessibility—the drawbacks for large subsets of consumers have long been ignored.

About 60% of American adults have at least one chronic illness. Seven of the 10 leading causes of death in America are directly related to a poor diet. The importance of nutrition as both a preventative and management tool for daily health, as well as the wide variety of personalized nutritional needs, are well-documented. But consumer education is just the start. For some, it’s monitoring sugar content and fiber to manage diabetes. For others, it’s reducing sodium for heart disease, or potassium for kidney disease, or boosting calcium for osteoporosis.

Taking a close look at the nutritional labels of every product purchased is an exhausting but necessary task for so many, and one that Adaobi is all too familiar with. Her passion and dedication to this business is driven by her sincere need to solve this problem.

Enter Vitalcart, a platform-agnostic, personalized nutritional filter guiding your online grocery shopping experience. Imagine searching for chip options on Walmart.com, having to click through to each product page to zoom in on the nutritional label (if present at all), then press the back button. Rinse and repeat—all to find a single item off your list that meets your needs.

With Vitalcart’s seamless integration as a browser extension, that simple search result for chips on Walmart.com activates a dropdown screen with Vitalcart’s top picks, personalized to your nutritional needs, across hundreds of search results.



So this is where you come in. Vitalcart’s founding engineer will join as the company prepares to launch in market, with adequate funding and an unparalleled support system within Launchpad. As the founding engineer, you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the company’s product roadmap and build out its engineering capabilities. Here are some of the qualities that make you the ideal Vitalcart founding engineer:

If this sounds like you (or it reminds you of someone you know), get in touch at talent@m13.co. Whether you have 5 hours or 40 hours a week to spare, we’d love to hear from you.

All the best,
M13 Launchpad Team