There are two series airing during this season of the JESUSgirlENT podcast: 1) Teaching Series: GOD-Results 2) Interview Series: I Overcame The ‘I Overcame’ interview series, will highlight the lives of men and women of GOD that overcame while trailblazing businesses, birthing ministries, breaking away from old habits and ultimately deciding to complete their goals in-spite of. Tonight’s episode will begin with Malvina De Salvo, Founder and CEO of Plateful. Malvina De Salvo is the Founder and CEO of Plateful, an AI-driven pediatric nutrition platform designed to shape healthy eating behaviors in early childhood. Plateful combines smart hardware, mobile learning, and behavioral science to address one of the most persistent challenges in family health: picky eating and poor nutrition habits among young children. At the center of Plateful is a multi-zone “smart plate” that uses sensors, lights, and audio to guide children through a structured eating journey—encouraging engagement with nutrient-dense foods first and reinforcing positive behaviors in real time. Paired with a companion app that delivers short-form nutrition learning modules, Plateful creates a closed-loop system that connects education, behavior, and habit formation at the moment it matters most: mealtime. Malvina’s work sits at the intersection of Food as Medicine, early childhood development, and digital health. She is building Plateful not only as a consumer product, but as a scalable behavior-change platform with applications across healthcare, public health, and food systems. By capturing real-time interaction data around how children engage with food, Plateful is generating a first-of-its-kind dataset that has the potential to inform clinical interventions, nutrition research, and population health strategies. In parallel, Malvina serves as a Project Manager and consultant for Feeding Illinois, where she is helping design and implement statewide Food as Medicine programs. Her work focuses on building scalable, financially sustainable models that connect food banks, healthcare systems, and payers to deliver medically tailored groceries and meals to high-need populations. Her approach emphasizes operational feasibility at scale—balancing clinical outcomes, cost constraints, and real-world food system capabilities, particularly across diverse and capacity-constrained environments. Plateful has demonstrated early traction through pilot testing, with strong engagement outcomes and high willingness among children to try new foods upon first use. The company is advancing toward broader pilot deployments, research collaborations, and commercialization, while actively raising capital to scale its platform. Malvina’s broader vision is to build a foundational layer for pediatric nutrition behavior—transforming how children learn about, interact with, and ultimately choose food. By intervening early, she aims to shift lifelong health trajectories and reduce the burden of diet-related disease at a population level. Link to Plateful website found here: www.pl8ful.com (We pray that this helps. Yes you can. Keep going! #GoForth #Romans828) Link to article covering Sis. Malvina found here: https://jesusgirlent.org/2026/05/21/pl8ful-owner-shares-journey-to-entrepreneurship-on-jesusgirl-ent-podcast/
