WHY HEALTHIFY IS GOING BEYOND CALORIE COUNTS

With diabetes drugs transforming the weight-loss market, the company is recalibrating its model

- Samiksha Goel

When Ritij Agarwal moved to Noida for a job in product operations at a fintech startup, his meals increasingly came from delivery apps Swiggy and Zomato. A couple of years ago, he decided to try something different.

“My junk food intake was quite high. I thought it would be a good idea to use an app like Healthify, which can track calorie intake,” he said.

What began as simple calorie tracking soon became more structured. When he started working out, the app’s macro breakdowns helped him monitor his protein intake more closely. The numbers offered a way to measure progress daily, visibly, and with some precision.

Agarwal isn’t the only one. Gauraang Arora, a content creator, downloaded the app with a specific goal: to stay in a calorie deficit while getting as close to his protein targets as possible. “The app could be faster, more optimized, less pushy about new features,” he said. “But it does the work.”

For over a decade, Healthify has been translating everyday Indian eating into something measurable, building not just a fitness app, but a behavioural archive of a country learning to worry about its metabolism. And so, on any given morning, before India's offices come alive, millions of breakfasts are converted into numbers. A bowl of poha becomes 200 calories. Chapatis, dosas and pooris all become data points.

When it started in 2012, the idea felt almost premature. India was only beginning to embrace food delivery apps and venture capital was chasing e-commerce and mobility. 'Wellness' was not yet an industry. Healthify began as a simple meal-tracking app, and later introduced personalized coaching to drive accountability and sustained behavior change. Today, the company claims to have over 40 million registered users.