the times | Thursday January 13 2022 2GM 3
News
If you’re ordering food to share, think
about what it is doing to your waistline.
People are less aware of the calories
they are consuming when they eat from
sharing plates, research has found.
Diners do not feel as if they “own” the
food and end up “mentally decoupling
the calories from their consequences”,
a team of Canadian scientists has said.
It happens even when people are fully
aware of how many calories the food
actually contains.
“When we see food on a shared plate,
we still understand how many calories
we are consuming, but we do not think
that those calories will impact our
waistline,” Dr Nükhet Taylor, the lead
author of the study and an assistant
professor of marketing at Ryerson
University in Toronto, said. “In other
The usual ethos of the surfing commu-
nity is to feel at one with nature, forget
the world’s troubles and catch a wave.
To which a university dropout has
added: create a financial technology
company so successful it has been given
a valuation greater than NatWest bank.
Guillaume Pousaz, 40, a keen surfer
who was born in Switzerland and lives
in Dubai, was celebrating yesterday
when his London-based company
Checkout.com became the third most
valuable private finance technology
company in the world.
The online payments business,
which he founded in 2012, raised $1 bil-
lion (£730 million) in a funding round at
a $40 billion valuation, making it the
most valuable private fintech company
in Britain. NatWest is valued at about
$38 billion.
Checkout, which processes pay-
ments for companies including Netflix
and Pizza Hut, attracted the American
backers Altimeter, Dragoneer and
Franklin Templeton, as well as Qatar’s
sovereign wealth fund, in an invest-
ment round that represents the latest
vote of confidence in London’s thriving
technology industry.
The UK is Europe’s leading destina-
tion for private technology companies
including total capital invested and
number of “unicorns” created, a recent
report found, with more than $100 bil-
lion of venture capital deployed last
year, three times the level in 2020. Uni-
corns are privately owned companies
valued at more than $1 billion.
The funding for Checkout suggests
that a trend towards bumper invest-
ment rounds for technology companies
capitalising on the surge in online trade
during the pandemic is set to continue.
Checkout competes with rivals such
as Stripe, valued at $95 billion last
March. It also helps clients such as
Siemens, Sony and Revolut and crypto-
currency platforms including Coinbase
and Crypto.com. Its valuation has
surpassed the $33 billion price tag that
investors put on Revolut, the London-
based digital bank, last July.
Before the funding Forbes estimated
Pousaz’s net worth to be $9 billion; the
latest investment means he could be
worth $21 billion on paper. He had
planned to become an investment
banker but dropped out of university in
Lausanne in 2005 when his father got
cancer. He subsequently moved to
California to become a surfer.
He took a job at International Pay-
ment Consultants, a payments process-
or, in 2006, after running out of cash.He has said he only took the job to fund
his surfing habit but it proved to be a
first step on a lucrative path in the pay-
ments industry. He left a year later to
set up his first company, a US-to-
Europe money transfer service.
The married father of three said
yesterday that the investment roundwas validation of Checkout’s efforts to
simplify payments processes for clients,
adding: “Given we’re still in chapter
zero of our journey [the funds] will fuel
our efforts to unlock the enormous
untapped potential ahead.”
Pousaz has noted that the pandemic
has led older people to shop online moreand predicted that online market share
gained during the pandemic would
prove to be permanent. The funds will
be used to expand in the United States
and improve its technology, the
company said. Checkout has more than
doubled its valuation since its last
investment round a year ago.European fintech firms
Klarna
Swedish payments group
Value: $45.6 billion
Revolut
UK provider of consumer and small
business financial services
$33 billion
Rapyd
London-based payments services
$10 billion
Mollie
Dutch payments start-up
$6.5 billion
Blockchain.com
Luxembourg-based cryptocurrency
wallet and exchange services
$5.2 billion
Trade Republic
German online stock broker
$5 billionSurfing billionaire’s Big Wednesday
An entrepreneur who
quit university to ride
waves has raised $1bn
for his UK tech firm.
James Hurley and
Jack Malvern report
GEOFF PUGH/TELEGRAPHGuillaume Pousaz took his first job
in the payments industry to fund his
surfing lifestyle. Checkout.com, which
he founded, is now worth $40 billionIf you care about your weight, keep those chips to yourself
words, because the shared plate does
not belong to us, it is a common plate
shared with someone else, we
believe that whatever we eat from
that plate will not be of consequence
to our weight. This, in turn, makes us
want to eat more, given that there
are no consequences to our food con-
sumption.
“We find that this intuition can be
quite problematic for weight manage-
ment because we end up consum-
ing more calories as a result
of sharing food with
others.”
The researchers
think that lower per-
ceived ownership of
food makes calories
seem inconsequential
because of what is known
as “mental accounting”, a pro-cess that people use for both monetary
budgets and food intake.
“People have a mental ‘budget’ for
how many calories they can consume
each day in order to maintain their
weight,” Taylor said. “What we are pro-
posing is that because shared food is
perceived to be less fattening, it is poss-
ible that people are not counting the
calories they consume from a shared
plate in this mental calorie budget.”
For the latest study, which was
published in the Journal of
Consumer Psychology,
the research team
carried out three ex-
periments with a
total of 719 people.They found that people rated chips
eaten with a friend from a shared plate
as 15 per cent less fattening then the
same amount of chips eaten from sepa-
rate plates, and 18 per cent less fatten-
ing than when dining alone. That was
despite there being no difference in the
actual amount of calories that people
said they thought the chips contained
in each scenario.
Even healthy snackers are not safe:
almonds from the shared plate were
deemed 22 per cent less fattening than
from a personal plate. The chocolate-
covered sweets M&M’s were also
thought to be 20 per cent less fattening
when eaten from a shared bowl than
when eaten alone. “Thus, rather than a
motivational mechanism that hinges
exclusively on unhealthy food, it seems
that sharing is causing a general bias,”
the study report said. “Critically, theseresults occurred in the presence of
explicit caloric information.”
Lastly, people had to imagine being at
a McDonald’s and eating a shared box
of chicken nuggets that belonged to
them or to a friend. They were asked
whether, after eating, they would prefer
to eat apple slices, a low-calorie option,
or an ice-cream sundae, a high-calorie
option. Those who had imagined eating
the nuggets owned by their friend were
13 per cent more likely to opt for the
sundae over the apple slices than those
who had imagined eating their own
nuggets. Sharing meals had an impact
on subsequent food choices, too.
“Our findings suggest that food
sharing may be encouraging excessive
caloric intake by leading consumers to
underestimate the fattening potential
brought on by shared food consump-
tion,” the study concluded.Sophie Freeman
l Eating food from a
shared plate makes it
seem less fattening