Roni Singer, entrepreneur, and journalist, for the past 20 years of she’d been working in major Israeli media outlets; as a reporter for “Haaretz”, “Uvda”- Keshet 12, “Calcalist” and a presenter and reporter for "Shetach Hefker (No Man's Land)" at Kan 11.
By Lemur Magazine
Following a diagnosis of gestational diabetes in her third pregnancy, she founded the digital venture “Sugar-Free Challenge” – A professional program that helps people who need and wish to reduce sugar from their diet, in which about 10,000 people have so far participated. Later, based on this program, Singer established “Refeed”, a digital platform to support people dealing with nutrition-based diseases (diabetes, bariatrics, fatty liver, and more). These days, contacts are being made to implement the platform in various health organizations in Israel and around the world. In July 2021, she published the book “Sugar-Free Challenge – learning to eat again in one month”, with her co-writer dietitian Noa Avraham, and published by Yedioth Books.
What was the last song you listened to? And what do you most expect listening to next?
Music is the absolute truth, the place to go out to and come back to, and I listen to a lot of music of different genres from morning to night. The last thing I listened to was an album recently released by an American band from Portland called Rose City Band that makes “Americana” music the way it should sound like. The next thing I’m waiting to listen to is the unreleased recording of my beloved John Coltrane. The recording is from a performance in Seattle in 1965 in which he plays the timeless love supreme. A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle.
What do you want to be when you grow up? How would your 10-year-old self react to what you do today?
Both looking ahead as a woman and as that girl, I’ve always wanted to do something that served my curiosity. Choosing to become a journalist was natural for the little girl I used to be, who recorded radio programs on a cassette tape and wrote the school newspaper. The daily work that introduced me to new people and greater-than-life stories satisfied my curiosity and made me get up every morning in anticipation. Come to think of it, these are exactly the qualities that underlie my passion for entrepreneurship these days. Setting up a digital health venture with no background in the field can really succeed only if you come up with tons of passion and curiosity for this new thing that wants to grow. When I grow up I want to be an entrepreneur-journalist and then turn it around again and be a journalist-entrepreneur and continue to be simultaneously in the two fields I love (and if I can do that while also being a winemaker, skipper, and writer, it would be just great).
What’s the career highlight you’re most proud of?
As a journalist, there have been many small moments of satisfaction where I have mostly been able to help people with my direct access to government offices or actually posting one injustice or another. I am proud of a series of articles I did in 2009 for “Haaretz” on the murder of women in Arab society for what is commonly called “family honor”, I am proud of my research in “Uvda” that ended in court indictments for bribery, I am proud that I founded Refeed / Sugar-Free Challenge, and I also announced that I want to sign an agreement with the health maintenance organization and I am glad it is happening these days. But most of all, I am happy for those diabetics and women with gestational diabetes who participated in the programs on our app and sent me their blood test results that showed they were back to healthy metrics.
What is the one thing we should pay more attention to as human beings?
Honesty. supposedly everything becomes “personal”, “authentic” and all of us or all of our actions are unique snowflakes that no one has seen before. Still, meeting personal loyalty and absolute honesty in people is something that evokes appreciation in me and does not happen often. In an era where the New Age dominates and sentences like “be true to yourself” and “take a moment to remember who you are” are commonplace, people seem to forget how to be real and honest. Not everything is stunning, not everything is amazing, not everything is awful. It’s really okay to know to tell the truth, accept it and move on.
For right now, what or who inspires you the most?
Oh wow, after a year of Covid and another half a year where people got used to doing zoom meetings anyway, my inspiration is to go out and meet people! I draw real inspiration from encounters that sometimes seem to have no deep importance. Years of interviewing people made me realize that I too want to initiate and do something meaningful “of my own”. Sometimes a thought said casually can plant a new desire in me to do, to see, to travel, to create. Jealousy (of the good kind) is the most stimulating thing there is 🙂
What do you most enjoy spending money on?
Wine. Even in harder economic times and certainly in better times, there is not a day in which one glass of quality wine is not justified. I like to imagine the vines from which the wine came from in Spain, France, or Napa Valley in the US. I like wine labels and like to read everything possible about the winery behind the bottle that is in front of me.
If you could go back to any time in history, where would you go?
18th century in France, but only as the owner of a cultural salon. Miraculously women are the ones who gathered in their elegant living room poets, writers, painters, and intellectuals, and with a lot of alcohol and a (relatively) free spirit they built an intellectual, creative, and interesting circle. Having said that, I would be thrilled to go back to my beloved nineties, it was so much fun!
Currently, what is your biggest challenge?
Undoubtedly my biggest challenge is to successfully complete the pilot we started with a major health organization. All of our work in recent years has been aimed at working with health organizations and after we won the tender, we must (my partner Noa Avraham and I) succeed and complete the joint pilot. Our platform will initially be offered to women with gestational diabetes, and later on, we aim to appeal to more audiences dealing with nutrition-based diseases and with them will come our next challenges, helping them to get healthier as well.
What is your most irrational fear?
I’m scared of underground parking-lots. Yes, I will usually prefer to park farther away rather than in a closed, underground, and dim place. Silly? Maybe, but there’s this irrational thought in my head that an earthquake that will eventually arrive, will happen just at the same time when I’ll be looking for a parking space in one of those places.