The scientist who wants to heal through food

Dr Shen Yiru is mighty chuffed with the new home of The Gentle Group.

Located in an industrial building in Admiralty Road, the 7,600 sq ft space is a massive upgrade from the social enterprise’s previous 360 sq ft base in Geylang.

The new facility, occupied since May, houses a central kitchen which can produce at least 2,000 meals a day for people with dysphagia, or swallowing difficulties. It also has a training centre where caregivers and staff of nursing homes can learn how to prepare flavourful and nutritious food for seniors and discharged patients.

Dr Shen, 47, has come a long way from 2019 when she left a stable job as assistant vice-president of A*ccelerate, the commercialisation arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) to chase a dream. With a PhD in neuroscience, specialising in physiology, she wanted to make a real impact in healthcare and improve the lives of patients.

It was a dream inspired by her late maternal grandmother, who struggled with dementia before her death more than 20 years ago. The illness stole her memory and cognitive abilities, and also left her with swallowing difficulties.

“She was a very sharp and knowledgeable woman who loved to eat and travel, but after she got dementia, she forgot everything, including how to swallow or chew,” Dr Shen recalls.

Attempts to feed her grandmother pureed food often resulted in frustration, as nothing tasted familiar to her. That experience stayed with Dr Shen a long time and finally inspired her to start GentleFoods, which boasts an extensive menu of popular Asian meals – from chicken rice to chicken satay – which are not just appropriately textured and flavourful but also nutritionally complete. As far as possible, the soft foods are moulded to resemble their original forms, to look more appetising

Besides the elderly, dysphagia can affect people who have had a stroke, neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and disease or injury to the head, neck, throat or oesophagus. Estimates suggest that approximately 8 per cent of the world’s population – or nearly 600 million people – have dysphagia.

“We want to bring life back through eating, we want to help patients recover through food,” Dr Shen says.

Restlessness had led the feisty elder of two children, born to a cargo supervisor and a hotel housekeeping staff member, to become a scientist. “I need to find challenges and create things,” she says, adding that she “cannot stand boring things”.

She obtained her doctorate from the National University of Singapore, where her thesis was on the cochlea and how hair cells affect hearing as a person ages.

Over the next 15 years, she worked in sales for major multinationals like healthcare conglomerate Sysmex Asia Pacific and life science and research company Thermo Fisher Scientific. During this time, she married a civil servant and became a mother to two, now aged 12 and 16.

Although well-paying, the regional roles required her to travel often.

“I thought I shouldn’t be such an uninvolved mother,” she says.

So, she joined A*Star, where her job was to leverage technologies developed in its laboratories and transform them into market-ready products. There was, however, a conviction that she should start looking at food as medicine.

“Food is comforting and brings people together. But in hospitals, people often don’t touch their food. Meal times are supposed to be happy times. If you are sick and you don’t eat well, you don’t recover,” says Dr Shen, adding that her grandmother’s dysphagia prompted her to read and do a lot of research on the subject.

“I asked myself if this problem will be a big one with the silver tsunami,” she says, referring to Singapore’s rapidly ageing population. By 2030, one in four Singaporeans will be aged 65 and above, compared with one in five now, and one in 10 in 2010. 

When she broached the idea behind GentleFoods to her parents and some friends, they thought she was crazy.

“But I told myself, I want to do something that is meaningful and impacts people’s lives directly – and that I should do it while I was still young,” says Dr Shen, who poured in a chunk of her savings to incorporate GentleFoods in 2017. She left A*Star in 2019 to run it after raising $500,000 from investors.

There was another reason why she believed she was on the right track: the International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative framework that was published in 2017. This standardised the terminology used to describe food textures and drink thickness: Drinks fall between Levels 0 and 4 for runny to thick liquids, while foods range from Levels 3 (liquidised foods) to 7 (easy to chew, normal food). 

“There are standards for medical devices but not in the food space except for this,” the scientist in Dr Shen stresses.

“Let’s say a patient with dysphagia goes to Thailand for medical treatment. If medical staff know that he’s a Level 4, they’d know exactly what sort of texture they could serve him.”

She started GentleFoods with a lean team comprising a sales manager, an administrator and a food technologist, all working out of a shared working space in Geylang. The first year was spent mainly on product development, which saw her diving into countless recipe and chemistry books.

Their initial offerings were limited to just a few items such as fish curry and chicken rice, packed in bento boxes that they publicised and sold on their e-commerce platform. Then – “whether lucky or unlucky” – Covid-19 happened. The lockdown brought their B2B operations to a halt.

“During this time, we approached corporations to sponsor the donation of our bento boxes to nursing homes. People were stuck there because of the lockdown, so these boxes brought a lot of joy. It was like a test bed for our products and people started to know us.”  

The feedback was more than encouraging. Patients liked that the pureed meals were tasty, well-shaped and colourful – in short, appetising. Focusing on local Asian flavours is a key focus and strategy. “It’s what our customers are familiar with.”

GentleFood’s menu has expanded to more than 50 items and now includes items such as nasi lemak, mango lassi, chwee kueh and kuih salat. A bakery specialising in soft bread and bakes is in the pipeline.

For public health science doctorate student Siti Hazirah Mohamad, 36, GentleFoods has been a godsend.

She is the caregiver to her father, 63, who suffered a stroke 14 years ago and has been on a feeding tube for more than a decade.

Blending food for him when he regained the ability to eat was an often frustrating exercise in trial and error. Finding GentleFoods a few years ago took a load off her mind, because it was safe and convenient, she says. More importantly, her father enjoyed eating again.

“The first time I saw him eat with relish, I cried. He’s not eating purely for sustenance now, he’s eating for pleasure.”

The journey has not been easy for Dr Shen, who went without a salary for three years. But her determination is now paying off. The team has grown to 18 members. Online sales are rising, and nursing homes and hospitals such as St Luke’s are now ordering meals for their patients. They now serve about 1,500 meals a day, freshly prepared and then frozen for easy steaming and serving.

Dr Shen is grateful for partners such as DBS, which believed in her vision. In 2021, she applied for and received the DBS Foundation Social Enterprise Grant, which enabled her to hire more staff and scale production. In July 2024, Heritas Capital’s Asia Impact First Fund, launched in 2023 with DBS Foundation and other partners, invested $2 million in The Gentle Group.

DBS has also helped with networking, relevant contacts and media outreach. Through DBS, Dr Shen participated in a six-month programme in Taiwan, exploring potential partnerships with manufacturers there.

Demand for GentleCare, the group’s service arm offering home visits, consultations and workshops, is also growing. Her goal, she declares, is “globalisation”.

“Singapore is well known for being multicultural and famous for its great food,” she says.

“I hope to do my bit and bring GentleFoods to the world.”