Blogs

The mission of LVNGbook, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, is to help people feel more confident about making healthy lifestyle changes in ways that fit who they are. The platform combines nutrition, behavioral science, culture, technology — and delicious food. Offering both digital tools and customizable cookbooks, LVNGbook makes healthy eating easier, and more enjoyable, than ever. 

To learn more about the company and its unique take on healthy cooking, we spoke with founder Shaun Chavis. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

What’s LVNGbook all about? 

We’re a platform that allows people to build customizable, print-on-demand cookbooks that help them eat well and prevent or manage chronic disease. If you go to the doctor and they say that you need to change the way you eat because of your health or a chronic disease, typically you get just a list of foods that are acceptable to eat (or not eat), and it’s hard to make meals from a list like that. 

Also, a lot of people don’t find their culture’s food traditions on that list, so they have to come up with their own adaptations, or they feel like they have to give up the foods they grew up with in order to be healthy. 

At LVNGbook, we view cultural connections and a robust social life as part of health. You can come to our platform, build a profile and enter your health needs, and get a collection of recipes that match your profile. Then you get to build your own personalized cookbook with those recipes. 

Can you say more about the importance of cultural relevance when it comes to healthy cooking? 

Some years ago, the World Health Organization came out with a paper called “Culture Matters,” which said that the systematic neglect of culture is the main thing that’s holding us back from achieving the highest level of healthcare worldwide. 

When people get that list from the doctor and they don’t see their food traditions represented, they think, “I guess my food isn’t healthy.” And that’s not true. When you look at Southern cooking, for instance, pecans have more antioxidants than any other nut. Corn has more antioxidants than any other whole grain.  

We believe it's an important part of health to stay connected to your cultural traditions and find the health and wholeness in that, to embrace it and share it with others. That's what we're trying to promote. 

What was the catalyst for starting the company? 

I used to be a cookbook editor, specializing in healthy cookbooks. In the food media at that time, there was an avatar or target customer, who was basically a 30-year-old mother living somewhere in the Midwest with a husband and two kids. That avatar didn’t really reflect the increasing diversity in the United States. There were a lot of cuisines that were overlooked. 

Part of the food media business was licensing recipes to clients and organizations who wanted to promote healthy recipes. I thought I could do something similar, but my vision was also to help people with different food traditions have access to recipes that are developed for health, but that reflect their cultural traditions. 

My own personal journey informed the company as well. I’ve had health issues all my life, so I needed to cook for my own health needs — but I didn’t want it to be, “Here's my food over here, and the rest of the family is eating something else.” Also, I grew up in a military family, so I traveled around the world and enjoyed different cuisines and connecting with people through food.  

What was it like going from being a book editor to a business founder? Do you have any other experience as an entrepreneur? 

I don’t have a business background, but my father was an entrepreneur. I watched him start a business in our dining room; he grew that company and kept it going until he retired when he was 78. It was fabulous to watch. He kept telling me, “You’d be a good entrepreneur!” But I didn’t believe him until I got to this point in my life, and I decided I wanted to start a company. 

What kind of setbacks have you experienced? 

I started LVNGbook in 2019, and I bootstrapped it with my own funds, along with a few investors. We had this extensive marketing launch planned. It was to be experiential: We were going to attend conferences where there are people who have health needs, and we were going to cook up some recipes and have people try them, and start the conversation that way. 

But COVID killed all that. That forced us to rethink things, and I started connecting with a lot of people who said they wanted something digital — an app they could send people to, or they wanted to be able to share recipes on their website. So we pivoted, and we’re putting the cookbooks on the back burner in order to focus on the B2B side. 

What’s the next step for LVNGbook? 

The next step for us is to create an application programming interface (API). We’re talking with an employee wellness company about licensing the API, and we’re looking for pilot partners for that. I really want to grow the retail side of things, because more retailers are looking at how they can help their customers eat healthy food.