Health app and gut shot brand Zoe is embarking on another round of redundancies, following swingeing cuts to its headcount earlier this year.
The company confirmed to The Grocer it was “restructuring our teams at Zoe to continue on our ambitious mission of transforming the health of millions”.
Sources with knowledge of the move suggested up to half of the company’s staff were “likely to be let go”. However, a spokeswoman for Zoe said that proportion was “not fully accurate, as it is early in the process”.
The latest restructuring comes just months after the company in April announced an urgent economy drive. At the time, CEO and co-founder Jonathan Wolf said the company needed to reduce costs by 20%, and without cutting staff the brand’s “monthly burn rate will be much too high”.
“While we continue to see many thousands of new members joining Zoe every month, our forecasts for 2024 growth were wrong,” Wolf wrote in a letter to employees at the time, which he posted on social media. “We have over-expanded our team in a way that is unsustainable until we have a larger member base.”
One source questioned if Wolf would be “so quick to put a big, self-serving public post up in LinkedIn like last time”.
As part of the economy efforts earlier this year, the company halted its current search for a London headquarters, stopped developments on a US warehouse and moved to “significantly reduce contract costs”.
Zoe provides at-home gut health test kits – involving a £299 at-home stool test – and personalised nutrition advice based on the results. Members can also apply for a continuous glucose monitor, which is worn on the arm, to “understand in real-time how your blood sugar responds to food, exercise, stress, and sleep”.
Membership gives users access to an app to track their diet, get a “motivating day score” and advice, as well as “unlimited chat support” with Zoe coaches. Various membership plans are offered – from £24.99 per month for a 12-month membership, up to £59.99 per month on a rolling membership basis.
After launching in April 2022, last year the Zoe app’s nutrition programme attracted £2m in investment from Dragons’ Den’s Steven Bartlett and signed up celeb ambassadors such as Davina McCall, who made a promotional video for Zoe last August. Wolf said last year the brand took on 100,000 new members.
In January, it collaborated with M&S to launch a Zoe-branded milk-based gut health shot. Called M&S Food x Zoe Gut Shot, and priced at £2 for 150ml, the drink contains over five billion live cultures from 14 strains of ‘friendly’ bacteria, is high in fibre and a source of calcium, according to M&S. The news coincided with a raft of column inches around the Zoe nutrition programme, fuelled by high-profile interviews with Professor Tim Spector, scientific co-founder of the programme, and his appearance on Netflix documentary You Are What You Eat.
Last week, Zoe announced a partnership with recipe box brand Mindful Chef on a range of “great for your gut” meal options. The recipes have all been taken from Zoe co-founder Professor Tim Spector’s new gut health cookbook The Food for Life Cookbook, which was released this month.
“Zoe was set up with the ambitious goal of improving global health,” a spokeswoman told The Grocer. “We are committed to making changes to our organisation as needed, so that Zoe can offer its science and nutrition advice to as many people as possible around the world.
“We are dedicated to keeping our employees engaged and informed in the coming weeks, and are prioritising providing support to those who may be impacted by these changes,” she added.
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