About Tucki

I grew up in two worlds at once. My family came from food, three generations of farmers, wholesalers, retailers, the kind of people who knew where every ingredient on the table started its life. My career went the other way, deep into technology, selling and building products that turned messy human problems into systems that worked.

For a long time, those two halves of me did not talk to each other. Until I started paying attention to how families in this country were eating.

The national diet is in trouble. Childhood obesity is rising. Type 2 diabetes is appearing in people far too young. Food bills are climbing while the quality of what ends up on the plate is going the other way. None of this is news. What is strange is how little of it is being addressed at the level where it actually plays out: inside the kitchens of ordinary families, on Tuesday evenings, when nobody has time and everyone is hungry.

I wrote a paper for Innovate UK proposing something I thought might help. I wanted funding to do one thing first: understand the problem properly, from the ground up, in real homes, with real people. Not what nutritionists said the problem was. What it actually was.

The discovery was the kind that reframes everything. It turned out the problem was not information. People know what they should be feeding their families. They know vegetables matter. They know ultra-processed food is not ideal. They know sugar is in too many things. The gap between what they know and what they actually do is not caused by ignorance.

It is caused by behaviour.

By Tuesday at 6pm with the kids melting down. By a budget that has to stretch another six days. By the fatigue of having made two hundred small food decisions already that week. By a partner who wants something different. By a recipe that needs an ingredient nobody has. The space between intention and action is where good diets go to die. No amount of more information closes that gap. In some cases it actually makes things worse.

Once we saw it, we could not unsee it. Every food app on the market was solving the wrong problem. They were piling more information onto people who already had too much of it. What was needed was something completely different. A system that lived inside the behaviour, not above it. Something that watched for the moments where routines were about to break, then stepped in before they did.

I teamed up with Tony Freeman, a creative force who has spent his career building characters and stories for brands including Disney. Tony understood something I did not, which is that behaviour change without joy attached to it almost never sticks. From there we pulled together a team of slightly obsessive people across product, AI, nutrition, design. We are all parents. We are all carrying the same problem in our own homes.

We released Tucki in late 2025. Within months we had thousands of active users. The App Store rating settled at 4.7. Most importantly, mothers started leaving reviews saying that for the first time, something was actually working.

We are not building a meal planner. We are building the operating system that sits underneath family food, then family wellbeing, then everything else a household has to coordinate just to function. Food is the first vertical because food is where the daily breakdowns happen. It is also where the daily wins live, if you can find them.

The aim is straightforward. We want to give families their power back. We want the next generation of children to grow up eating real food, in real homes, with parents who do not feel like they are failing every Tuesday at 6pm.

That is the mission. The rest is detail.