Vitamin D home tester wanted – 50, 000 dollar prize offered by Nestlé
Nestlé Offers US$50,000 For Tackling Vitamin D Deficiencies
- “… offering US$50,000 to the winning applicant who develops a simple and economic method for checking daily levels, and creates an app that stores results and provides professional advice on how to improve them”
Details at https://www.henri.nestle.com/ The deadline for responses is 17th March 2019.
Observation by Henry Lahore, founder of Vitamin D Life
I have been tracking simple Vitamin D testers since 2013
Many candidate designs have come and gone.
It appears to be a very difficult problem
The only group which I am aware of which has a chance at getting this prize is Nanospeed
My review of their development is Low-cost Vitamin D testers (two yes-no tests for 11 dollars) - 2024
They currently have a low-cost tester that requires an expensive readout device.
Would be OK for use iin pharmacies. offices, but not in the home
It appears feasible to use a smartphone(with camera) as no-cost readout device
Update May 2026 — what became of the prize, and the technology that arrived anyway
Claude AI
The prize produced a concept, not a tester
The challenge ran through Nestlé's HENRi open-innovation platform, tied to the NIDO milk brand and aimed at the MENA region (high deficiency despite abundant sun). Deadline: March 2019.
The only publicly documented partner to take it on was Nebuli (a London AI firm). Their deliverable was not a blood test. Per their own case study, it was a non-invasive scoring concept — an AI/"augmented-intelligence" app that estimates vitamin D status from behavioral and lifestyle data and returns a score plus personalised tips. It sidesteps measurement rather than solving it.
- No official "winner" for an actual home assay was ever announced.
- No Nestlé-branded measurement product shipped from this.
- On its own terms, the prize did not produce the home tester it asked for.
Source: Nebuli case study · HENRi project page
But the smartphone-camera readout I called "feasible" in 2021 is now real
The prize's stated goal — a simple, economical home check with an app readout — has since been met by others, independent of Nestlé's money. The smartphone-as-readout architecture is the key enabler.
| Option | Method | Readout | Evidence grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preventis SmarTest Vitamin D (Biohit / Preventis GmbH) | Lateral-flow, finger-stick blood | Phone camera reads line intensity → 25(OH)D | A — commercial product, in market |
| Smartphone sandwich-LFA (Kim et al., Diagnostics MDPI, Nov 2025) | Sandwich-type LFA | App auto-captures + classifies image | B — peer-reviewed validated prototype |
| NutriPhone (Cornell) | LFA with in-situ elution buffer | Smartphone imaging platform | C — earlier proof-of-concept, not productized |
Preventis SmarTest — the phone camera scans the lateral-flow lines and uses test-line intensity to quantify 25(OH)D as high / optimal / low, with results shown in the app immediately. This is the no-cost-readout design described on this page. Caveat: it bins into deficient / insufficient / sufficient bands rather than a precise ng/mL value.Product page
Kim et al. 2025 — strongest recent validation: a smartphone-integrated sandwich-type LFA for semi-quantitative 25(OH)D with automated image analysis; detection range 5–100 ng/mL, low interference and low cross-reactivity from structurally similar vitamin D derivatives.Full study · PMC
Honest gaps (the original difficulty still partly holds)
- Every shipping option is semi-quantitative — categories or wide bands, not a precise number.
- Most require a proprietary app, not a generic camera.
- Truly quantitative, lab-equivalent home testing still depends on central-lab infrastructure (LC-MS/MS, CLIA, ELISA), expensive equipment, and skilled personnel.
- Bottom line: a precise, fully home-based, no-special-device tester remains hard — but "good enough for triage" smartphone-readout testing is now real and purchasable.