Project Envision

The app that I want to build is a nutrition evaluation application that can analyze the ingredients found in a recipe and inform the user of the final dish's nutritional value.

Description

To use this app, the user manually inputs the recipe's ingredients and measurements with the addition of the specific brand of ingredient they are using. For example, in a recipe that calls for 1 cup of milk, the user can further specify that they are using 1 cup of "Horizon 2% Organic reduced fat milk" from a drop-down prompt list. I plan to use the Nutritionix public api to retrieve nutrition data from their database of over 800,000 common American grocery items.

Objective

The app will provide the cumulative nutritional value of a dish with all its ingredients. This nutritional value will be represented with the stats found in a typical 'nutrition facts' label: total fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, sugars, vitamins, etc. This overall nutritional value will be calculated by multiplying the amount of each ingredient with its corresponding nutritional stat per gram, then adding the values from each of these ingredients into an overall value for each stat (overall cholesterol, etc.).

Purpose

This app will allow the user to read a dish's overall nutritional value just like on a packaged food box with the aim to help users make decisions on the serving size and ingredient contents of their food.

Scope/boundaries

The simplest version of this app involves manually inputting the recipe ingredients to include specific brand names and matching the ingredients within the Nutritionix database. Since the database only contains common American grocery items, it may not be applicable to recipes that require ingredients that cannot be found in the US.

Target users

The target users would be people who want nutritional information about the food dishes that they make according to their shopping preferences, and who ideally get their grocery items in the US.

Key benefits

This app will do the work of searching for the nutritional information of each ingredient and calculating the overall nutritional value of a dish. The user will be able to tweak the ingredients and/or measurements and view the nutritional differences as a result.

Competition

RecipeIQ has a similar concept to my idea. The user is able to scan a recipe or search for a recipe online and select the portion of the page that contains the recipe, after which a word recognition algorithm will run and match the ingredients in a database and use the information found for each ingredient in the database to calculate several of the dish's stats such as calories, sodium, saturated fat content, etc. According to the reviews, the app's main issue is that it is not always accurate in detecting ingredients and/or it is unable to find basic ingredients such as milk/eggs, and leaves the user to search through the database for the correct ingredient. Since the ingredients found through the database search are non-specific to the brands of the ingredients each user may be using, the overall nutritional value returned may be under or overestimates of the actual value due to deriving stats from generalized ingredients (such as "milk, lowfat" instead of "Horizon Organic 1% lowfat millk").

Differentiation

I want to see if I can recreate the recipe calculating concept of the RecipeIQ app with improved accuracy using a different ingredient database. The database that RecipeIQ uses is based on the USDA's Standard Reference database, but I want to try using Nutritionix's database with common grocery items. While RecipeIQ provides the user the convenient ability to scan or highlight a recipe and have the app autofill the ingredients to search, this limits the ingredient search to generic ingredient names that are not tailored to the user's shopping preferences, and may thus provide inaccurate nutritional readings.

I probably won't be putting this app in the app store since the API calls for the free version of Nutritionix is limited to 2 active users, so I'll mostly be making this app for the experience of working with APIs.