In this Innovator’s Hangout, we meet Anthony Boldin, an engineer turned food innovator who is changing how plant-based nutrition works for real life. After decades in e-commerce and tech, Anthony went vegan to align his lifestyle with his values, but quickly discovered a hidden problem. Despite tracking every meal and workout, he found himself gaining fat and losing performance. His engineer’s mind kicked in, and what started as a personal frustration became LiveComplete, a new kind of food company that uses smart science to close the nutritional gaps in plant-based diets. With proprietary NutriMatch technology and a mission to make clean eating easy and complete, Anthony and his growing team are proving you can live your values without sacrifice. Taste, texture, performance and nutrition can all coexist, and Anthony is here to show how.
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You have built successful companies in e-commerce and tech. What inspired you to take such a deep dive into food and nutrition for your next venture?
I’ve always been drawn to solving messy, misunderstood problems, especially the ones hiding in plain sight. Lately, I’ve shifted my focus towards things that matter deeply, things with real impact for people and the planet.
Food wasn’t on my radar until I switched to a plant-based diet and realized how broken the nutrition side of it really was. I was eating “clean,” tracking my macros, doing everything right… but my body said otherwise
Let’s face it. Plant based living is hard. So. Many. Compromises. That friction hit a nerve and I felt compelled to solve it. It has become my personal mission to fix this whole thing.
That mission now guides everything we do: to “Make Plant Based Living Easy”, one where there are “No Compromises” and you “Sacrifice Nothing”. It’s our rallying cry, and when we pull this off to its full potential, every ounce of energy will have been well worth it.
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Your own plant-based journey exposed a problem most people do not realize exists. How did you connect that personal experience to a scalable business idea?
Turning a personal frustration into a scalable business takes more than just a good idea – it takes passion, persistence, and the ability to connect the dots. If you’re not personally invested in solving a problem that matters to you and the people around you, you won’t make it through the hard parts. All the skills you don’t yet have. All the things that don’t come naturally. All the roadblocks. A million people might have an idea for a business, but maybe one will take it across the finish line.
But scale requires another level of thinking. The deeper I went, the clearer it became: this isn’t just my problem. It’s systemic. It affects vegans, athletes, people trying to stay lean, kids, parents, seniors. It’s a universal issue hiding under the label of we want everyone to “Live Your Best Life” – and that starts with what we put in our bodies.
That’s when NutriMatch evolved from being a product into a platform. And LiveComplete evolved from being a solution into a vision. When you make that shift… from product to platform, from symptom to system… that’s when scalability becomes real.
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NutriMatch is a unique approach. How did your engineering background help you create this algorithm and why does the Match Rate really matter for everyday people?
As an engineer, I’m wired to sort through problems and find solutions. It wasn’t enough to say I felt off.. I needed to understand why.
Like most people, I had assumed all protein was essentially the same. Whether it came from plants, animals, milk, seeds, anything… protein was protein… right?
But what I discovered was that it could not be further from the truth. Amino acid profiles vary wildly between foods. Once I saw the data, it was shocking. The idea that protein was interchangeable is simply wrong. Then came the lightbulb: If proteins differ wildly between foods, then our muscle must be different too… and they are
That insight led to the creation of Match Rate™, a simple scoring system from 0 to 100 that shows how closely a food’s amino acid profile matches what our bodies are made of and need.
Why does it matter? Because when your protein doesn’t match your body’s needs, your system can’t use all of it. The excess gets burned as energy or, more often, stored as fat. That affects everyone. Whether you’re trying to build muscle, lose weight, keep your strength in your senior years, or maximize your growth as a child, protein quality matters.
And that’s where the engineering mindset truly came in, because all engineering starts with a measurement system. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. Match Rate gives us a way to measure what really matters in protein, so we can finally optimize it.
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Many plant-based brands focus on taste or branding. You went straight to protein science. Why did you decide to tackle the hardest part first?
Honestly, they’re all hard. But creating plant-based foods that are nutritionally equal… or better… than the real thing? That’s been impossible, until we came along.
Most plant-based brands don’t lead with nutrition because they can’t. So instead, they focus on what’s easier to control: branding, packaging, clever taglines, a celeb endorsement, and of course, taste. And that can work… to a point. You might win over some vegans. But if you’re not matching the nutritional quality of animal-based foods, you won’t win over the other 95% of the population that isn’t, and that’s where real change happens.
We went straight to the toughest problem because nutrition is the foundation of real impact. You can have the best-tasting product in the world, but if people don’t trust what’s in it, they won’t stick with it. Just look at the reviews for struggling brands: “I don’t know what’s in this,” “I want something that’s actually good for me.”
Nutrition is a core part of making plant-based living easy. And for it to truly be easy, it has to be complete. You can’t just solve taste or texture. People care deeply about what they put in their bodies. They want food that tastes great and fuels them at the highest level.
That’s why we tackled protein science first. It’s the hardest part, but also the most essential.
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LiveComplete launched entirely online. What did you learn about reaching customers digitally in a market that is still dominated by big grocery chains?
That it really is dominated by big chains… grocery or otherwise! Reaching customers digitally is expensive. Reaching them through retailers is also expensive. There’s a reason why gross margins in food and CPG have to be so high: there are just so many layers of cost… ads, marketing, distributors, incentives, fees, shelf resets, retail buyers, you name it.
What I’ve learned is this: your biggest impact usually comes from showing up where people already are, rather than trying to drag them to where you are. That’s why malls work. That’s why Amazon works. If your product is where people already shop, they discover you as part of the flow. That kind of embedded reach is the most cost-effective exposure you can get.
But here’s the tradeoff: while that kind of reach is cost-effective in the short term, it’s not always the best long-term strategy. Being online means you have a direct relationship with your customer… your actual end user. Anywhere else, it’s truly the store’s customer, not yours.
In an ideal world, you want every customer to buy from you directly, but in the practical world, you need a balance between loyal fans who come to you directly, and casual discovery in the places they already shop.
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You brought on dozens of co-founders to help grow LiveComplete. What does that model look like and how does it shape the culture and community around the brand?
It’s not traditional, and that’s intentional. We built a company with a strong vision and mission, and that’s attracted incredible people willing to put in incalculable effort because they believe in what we’re building, not just where we are, but where we’re going.
Food companies require such a wide range of talent, it’s honestly daunting. Science, formulation, branding, marketing, operations, regulatory, storytelling… it takes a village. So instead of hiring top-down, we invited in the right people and gave them skin in the game. Real contributors. Real ownership.
The result is a culture built on contribution, not hierarchy. Everyone’s invested, not just financially, but emotionally. There’s a kind of “restaurant owner energy” you can feel across the team. We all treat this like it’s ours… because it is. That energy shows up in the product, the messaging, the details, and the mission.
We know where we’re headed… even if it’s a long journey to get there.
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Looking ahead, what is your biggest hope for how LiveComplete can shift how people think about plant-based eating and nutrition as a whole?
I want people to live their best lives, and that starts with the best fuel and nutrition. Plant-based shouldn’t mean compromise.
In fact, what if it didn’t even need to be a category? When something is better for you, better for your family, better for your kids, it shouldn’t matter what it’s made of. That’s the ideal future. The conversation shifts from “what it is”…to what it does for your body.
…and if it happens to be plant-based? Even better, because that means it’s also a more compassionate and sustainable way to live as a result, not as a requirement. If we can make it as good or better than what people are used to, then plants will become king. That’s when we’ll make a real impact, but not before. People want what’s best for them, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
My goal is to make it radically easy for people to eat in a way that’s clean, efficient, and purpose-driven, whether they’re athletes, busy parents, or just trying to feel better in their body.
Long-term, Match Rate will become the standard for how we evaluate protein, not just in supplements, but across food categories, brands, and even the global food system. It can happen sooner than we think.
