Rethinking What It Means to Eat "Healthy"
Can a new scoring system bring clarity and personalization to the way we shop for food? Sam Citro Alexander breaks it down.
Is a food’s healthiness something you can measure?
It’s a fascinating question: one that’s broad, slippery, and even personal, depending on what your own body needs.
I kicked around that notion with Sam Citro Alexander, the 32-year-old co-founder of bitewell. Born into an Italian-American family where food was both a love language and a source of struggle, Sam has made it her mission to answer that question—not just for herself, but for the rest of us, too.
For over a century, the calorie has been the prevailing estimation of whether we think something is good for us. Increasingly, we know this is a flawed way of thinking: after all, 100 calories from a sugary cereal don’t land in your body the same way as the same amount from a bowl of lentils. The calorie is merely a measure of how much energy the food is providing.
Five years ago, Sam and her co-founder Chris Fanucchi sought to paint a more complete picture. In his 20s, Fanucchi had already launched a caffeinated sparkling beverage called Limitless, which was acquired by Keurig Dr Pepper in 2020. He then joined an early-stage venture program to explore the intersection of food and medicine, and sought to find the right collaborators. That’s when he and Sam crossed paths. She understood how to scale businesses; he had a track record of building them. Together, they launched bitewell with the intention of creating and monetizing a new measurement to improve how people understand food.
Over the course of three years, the pair, along with a team of scientists and dieticians, developed the FoodHealth Score: a simple, straightforward number ranging from 1 to 100 that evaluates how healthy a food is for an individual. By assembling a large database-–a combination of government data, licensed sources and even information collected from food packages—their proprietary scoring system moves beyond calorie counts and eschews ambiguous terms like clean or organic. Instead, it focuses on two primary factors: nutrient density and ingredient quality.
In this context, nutrient density is the ratio of beneficial nutrients (think fiber, potassium, and protein) to less beneficial ones (like added sugars or refined carbs). Meanwhile, the ingredient quality function highlights whole grains, healthy fats, and omega-rich oils while flagging things like artificial preservatives, dyes, and sweeteners.
How it works
First, the FoodHealth Score assesses the food itself using the above metrics. But then—and this is the cool part—it can score the food for you. So if consumers are, say, taking amoxicillin or allergic to shellfish, it can personalize the score–a feature that the company plans to make available later this year.
With over $10 million in funding so far, bitewell is working to license its score into major grocery store chains. In late 2024, it did so with Kroger, integrating the score directly into the shopping experience for their millions of consumers across their stores— which include Harris Teeter, Ralphs, and King Soopers, among others. Now, when customers shop online or browse aisles with the Kroger app, they can see a score that indicates how healthy a food item is, based on a clear-cut set of parameters.
The partnership also plugs into Kroger’s OptUp Nutrition Program, which tracks purchases over time and can give customers a broader view of their habits.
According to Citro Alexander, bitewell has now entered into agreements with several other grocery partners to launch its scoring system in their stores before the end of the year. The goal, she says: “To bring the FoodHealth score to every place a person is buying food, whether it’s a restaurant, a corner store or even in line at the cafeteria.”
AMC: How did this idea come to you?
SCA: Honestly? I came to it the hard way—through years of gut issues no one could explain. When I was around ten, I started having severe trouble keeping food down. I’d eat a few bites and feel overwhelmingly full, or I’d vomit. Eventually–two decades later– I learned I had gut dysbiosis from taking too many antibiotics as a kid, which caused a host of intolerances—lactose being a big one. Then, in my early twenties, I went to Indonesia. I originally went to learn about ingredients in the context of skincare, but the people I met there shifted everything. They looked at me and said: You can fix this with food. They taught me how to make healing pastes with ginger, turmeric, and galangal; how to use pepper to boost efficacy; and how gut-friendly ingredients could be both food and medicine. That trip changed my life. I started to heal through food—and that became the spark for everything that came next.
AMC: Did you always want to be in food?
SCA: I've always loved food, but I never thought it would be my career calling. Growing up in Manalapan, New Jersey, I was a theater kid, and I wanted to be a working actor. I was always making up songs, performing in the living room. I got really serious about performing arts in high school, studied opera at Boston Conservatory, and later acting at NYU’s Tisch School.
But as I was staring down the opportunity to take a year-plus touring gig, the reality of the lifestyle hit me. Living on a bus, city after city—it didn’t feel like the dream. I had no idea what was next. I was graduating, living in a $2,150/month New York apartment, and just started asking friends for jobs. That’s how I landed at a skincare startup called JUARA as an early employee. That opened the door to a decade-long career in the beauty industry.
As soon as I started speaking to people about the food challenges I had and how I overcame them, I realized that food issues are more common than we think—and they come in many shapes and sizes. Diet-related health conditions affect 1 in every 2 people. That's an intolerably high number for something that is, in many cases, preventable by eating the right foods from the start.
AMC: Tell me about your journey to entrepreneurship. And how you iterated this idea. Was it instant?
SCA: I was doing steady corporate work that I didn’t feel particularly connected to when I met my co-founder, Chris. He had been consulting and exploring this idea of food-as-medicine. He said, “There’s something happening here. We can build a big business that has the ability to help millions of people.” That was the seed of bitewell.
Our mission from day one has been the same: to improve the world’s health through food. But how we got there evolved a lot. We started as a healthy restaurant delivery app—turns out, not what people needed. Then we tried a “food farmacy”,a curated marketplace for medicinal foods. People loved the concept and came for our health scores,but they didn’t want to buy food on a new platform: they wanted the score where they already were shopping. That was the aha moment: the marketplace wasn’t the product. Our FoodHealth Score was.
So, we pivoted. Today, we’re a data company. We license our FoodHealth Score to retailers and food manufacturers who are committed to helping people eat well. We help people understand how healthy a food is, at the exact moment they’re making a decision.
AMC: Talk to us about how you see the importance of physical activity and how you exercise. What do you do–and is there anything you would like to learn?
SCA: I love to move, and I especially love to move in nature. Whether I’m hiking, horseback riding, or casting a line fly fishing, the outdoors is where I feel most alive and connected. Living in both California and Colorado really deepened that connection and introduced me to new ways to stay active.
For years, pilates was my go-to; it gave me a strong foundation in body awareness and control. But recently, I’ve discovered the power of weight training, and it’s been transformative. It’s not just changing my body, it’s changing how I carry myself. I feel strong, capable, and clear headed. I think that’s especially important for women—there’s something deeply empowering about building physical strength and watching it ripple into every other area of life.
I try to move every day, even if it’s just a long walk or a few minutes of stretching. Movement is how I reconnect with myself. As for what I’d love to do more of: I used to dance, and I'd love to come back to that. Moving the body with freedom.
Ultimately, I see physical activity as a form of self-respect. It’s not about aesthetics—it’s about energy, clarity, and staying aligned with who I want to be.
Sam Citro Alexander is a rock star CEO Founder. I love this quote: “I see physical activity as a form of self-respect. It’s not about aesthetics—it’s about energy, clarity, and staying aligned with who I want to be.”