JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — April 11-17 marks Black Maternal Health Week. The annual campaign founded by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance aims to improve maternal health outcomes among black women who statistically face greater maternal health complications.
While supermarket barcode apps are common, Erica Bunton’s app, Good Roots, specifically targets pregnant women aiming to ensure that the food they buy is up to nutritional standards.
While the app is for everyone, she particularly focuses on black women, as they are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Contributing factors include healthcare quality and underlying conditions.
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Good Roots launched on March 1. A user has to scan a barcode of a food product, and the app checks every ingredient against the app’s knowledge base of over 6000 food ingredients. You can also look up products in the app, and it tells you what to look out for based on your stage of pregnancy.
“And this one was a seaweed snack, and it got 69 out of 100. And that’s pretty strong for it to be a snack, right?” said Bunton.
The app flags notable ingredients, researched by agencies like the CDC and FDA. It also provides a score on the app based on its nutritional value, among other features. So what happens if a product isn’t listed?
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“The more people scan, the more we can put items in the review and add the ingredients of that item to our database,” Bunton added.
Bunton, a Jacksonville native, has a background in medical device and pharmaceutical sales. Bunton says her cofounder, her husband Charles, has a 15-year background in software development.
She was inspired to create the app after having endured two high-risk pregnancies.
“That experience really taught me that the information is out there, but it’s sometimes and often overlooked because of resources or just not really understanding where to look,” said Bunton.
The CDC highlights that hundreds of women die in the U.S. during pregnancy or in the year after, with thousands more having related challenges. The agency adds that 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.
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“Understanding that a lot of these things can be prevented if we have the knowledge and if we understand the resources that are out there,” said Bunton.
While the app is for everyone, Bunton says there is a target audience that would benefit most from using it.
“The access to this application is important for black women because we do tend to fall on the risky side of things when it comes to health and when it comes to nutrition,” Bunton explained.
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