For most of its modern history, food deemed healthy came with a tradeoff: it might be good for you, but it probably wouldn’t taste very good, and it would almost certainly require discipline.
Matt Barnard thinks that framing is the real failure of the food system.
“If health requires discipline, it will never be the default,” Barnard told The Spoon in a recent interview. “Virtuous suffering is a system failure.”
Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of One Unlimited, the parent company behind one.bio, a fiber science platform, and GoodVice, the newly launched consumer brand debuting this week. The company’s protein shakes, featuring 10 grams of oat fiber and 15 grams of protein, go on sale tomorrow on the GoodVice website.
Fiber’s Branding Problem
According to Barnard’s cofounder and chief science officer, Matt Amicucci, the seed for the company’s fiber technology was planted when he was working in professional kitchens.
“I actually started my career as a chef,” Amicucci said. “I loved feeding people and seeing how people interacted with food.”
That curiosity eventually took him to UC Davis, where he studied food science and later earned a PhD in chemistry, focusing on dietary fiber and how different carbohydrates interact with the gut microbiome. At the time, he said, fiber was treated as a blunt instrument.
“We didn’t understand how the fiber in an apple or a sweet potato was different from a molecular standpoint,” Amicucci said. “And we didn’t understand how they could influence health in different ways.”
That gap, between how other nutrients were treated and how fiber was understood, continued to gnaw at Amicucci. While vitamins and minerals were broken down into discrete, functional categories over the past century, fiber remained lumped into a single number on the nutrition label.
Out of that realization came what he and one.bio call the glycopedia, a proprietary database cataloging the molecular structures and biological functions of dietary fibers found across thousands of foods.
“We’ve gone through monomer by monomer, linkage by linkage, branch by branch,” Amicucci said. “What the structures of these dietary fibers are, and how the gut microbiome interacts with them.”
According to Amicucci, the goal isn’t just to better classify different types of fiber. It’s to predict the health outcomes they can express. By mapping fiber structure to microbial behavior, the company hopes to identify which fibers drive specific biological outcomes, from blood glucose regulation to immune response. The team has already published research using machine learning models to predict how novel fibers would interact with the microbiome, then validated those predictions experimentally.
“Turns out our prediction was correct,” Amicucci said.
That work eventually led the team to beta-glucan, a fiber found in oats, which became the foundation for one.bio 01, the ingredient now powering GoodVice’s first products.
Underlying one.bio’s approach is the idea that modern food didn’t just lose nutrients as it became more processed, it lost biological signals. According to Barnard and Amicucci, fiber isn’t simply a nutrient but a communication layer between food and the body, one that tells the gut microbiome how to regulate metabolism, immunity, and inflammation. As food processing stripped fiber out for shelf life, texture, and cost, those signals disappeared as well. “Our microbiome takes it in, does work on our behalf, and then creates signals for our gut, metabolic, and immune systems,” Barnard said. Without those signals, he explained, many everyday foods became metabolically chaotic, even if they still delivered calories.
Why Most Fiber Doesn’t Work
According to Barnard, the industrial food system has largely failed to deliver meaningful fiber for three reasons. First, many widely used fibers are synthetic or highly modified, meaning the microbiome doesn’t recognize them. Second, some natural fibers perform well biologically but deliver poor consumer experiences (“You wouldn’t want Metamucil in your soda”). Third, others, particularly inulins and FOS, can be inflammatory or cause gut distress at effective doses.
“The secret sauce,” Barnard said, “is anti-inflammatory fibers that have real function and can be used at high concentrations without affecting the experience whatsoever.”
Before the interview, the company sent me some products to try, including an orange pomegranate seltzer with 20 grams of fiber, as well as packets of the GoodVice protein shake powder. Both tasted pretty good and, as promised, there was no chalky, fiber-y taste.
From Platform to Product
Barnard told me that the GoodVice shakes, which are one.bio’s first consumer-facing expression, are meant to be a reference design. The shakes contain 10 grams of one.bio 01 prebiotic oat fiber, 15 grams of protein, and other nutrients like creatine and magnesium.
But the broader ambition extends far beyond shakes.
“When you go to the grocery store, 70 percent of calories are not whole foods,” Barnard said. “What we’re doing is returning the signals of whole food to those calories.”
He said that could mean oat milk with oat fiber restored, juice with fruit fiber put back in, or baked goods that behave metabolically more like their whole-food counterparts.
When I asked about GLP-1s, Barnard said he while he thinks pharmaceutical responses are necessary for many people, he sees fiber-based products as a way to prevent people from getting to the point where a GLP-1 shot is required.
“What our fibers can do is prevent people from getting there in the first place.”
For others, he sees fiber-based foods as a potential off-ramp.
“There are plenty of people who don’t like the side effects,” Barnard said. “We can give them those signals without pharmaceuticals.”
Looking ahead, Amicucci believes that as fiber becomes better understood, it will enable more personalized nutrition. When I asked him whether that would take a decade to arrive, he said it would happen much sooner.
“I don’t think it’s going to take 10 or 20 years,” he said. “I think it’s right around the corner.”
You can see my full interview with the cofounders of One Unlimited/One.bio below.
