glüf wins the Businesswoman of the Year Award

I'll be honest with you. When we submitted the entry, I didn't let myself think too hard about what winning would actually mean. You protect yourself a bit, don't you? You do the work, you make the case as well as you can, and then you wait.

We won. And I'm still processing it.

📸 [ADD PHOTO: award moment / ceremony]

What this award means to me

I want to say something about this carefully, because I don't want it to sound like a talking point. Building a health-adjacent product that primarily serves a community with significant anxiety around food and safety requires a particular kind of listening. I'm the wife of a coeliac. This is not a market opportunity I identified. It is a problem I watched my husband navigate for years.

That proximity to the problem shapes every decision we make at glüf. Being recognised for Businesswoman of the Year matters not just as a personal milestone. It's a signal that the work is being taken seriously. That a product built for a medically vulnerable community, by a female founder without outside funding, is worth paying attention to.

What glüf is building

77% of people with coeliac disease have been accidentally exposed to gluten when eating out. That's not a niche problem. It's a widespread, daily health risk for a community that deserves better infrastructure.

glüf uses AI to build up-to-date gluten-free ratings for restaurants, rated on staff knowledge, labelling clarity, gluten-free variety and taste. We already have 1,000 users, with active users returning to the app an average of four times a month. Everything built so far has been bootstrapped.

We're now building the next phase: a structured onboarding and validation system for restaurants, so venues can submit and maintain their own allergen and menu information as things change day to day. This closes the loop between what restaurants say they can do and what coeliacs actually experience.

📸 [ADD PHOTO: Nicola / team]

Thank you

To Jack and Harry, my co-founders: this is ours, not mine. To the coeliac community who trusted us early, every review you left and every restaurant you rated made this platform what it is. And to everyone who has supported glüf from the outside: thank you for seeing what we were trying to build before it was finished.

This award is for every coeliac who has ordered from the gluten-free menu and spent the next three days unwell. We see you. glüf exists because of you.

Download glüf

glüf is free to download and always will be. If you haven't tried it yet, please do. And if you know someone with coeliac disease who struggles with eating out, pass it on. The more people use it, the better the data gets, and the safer the community becomes.