Our Vision
We see food not just as nutrition, but as one of the most frequent behavioral decisions people make every day.
Zinca is an exploration into how behavioral science, nutrition, and real-world constraints can come together to create tools that people can actually live with — especially in moments where eating decisions tend to break down.
Rather than relying on motivation, discipline, or marketing narratives, we focus on designing for behavior as it is, not as it should be.
Food is our starting point, not our boundary.
It’s a practical interface to test how structure, timing, and design can reduce friction, decision fatigue, and repeated failure around eating.
From the beginning, this project is being developed in collaboration with nutrition scientists, behavioral researchers, and public health partners — with the goal of building interventions that are evidence-informed, ethically grounded, and scalable beyond a single product.
Founder
The project was initiated by Wendy Yuan, who lives with Wilson disease, a rare genetic condition that requires lifelong dietary management.
Through managing her own condition, she observed recurring challenges not only within rare disease communities, but also among the general population, where maintaining a stable and sustainable relationship with food remains difficult over time.
This project explores whether alternative design approaches to food can address these challenges, while also contributing to greater awareness of Wilson disease.