Quick Add Nutrients
This is a real must-have feature. A lot of times, I find myself staring at a nutrition label or nutrition info, with no barcode. Whether it’s in a restaurant, or in a cookbook, or in a recipe/meal planning app. I don’t want to create a custom food… that’s too tedious; I might not have time in the moment. And maybe these will be one-offs that I won’t use again.
Why not have an option to just QUICK ADD a food. I select the option and its opens up a form for me to punch in the info. This would have a “title” field that by default could be “Quick Add” or something. I could edit that, if I want, to give it a name that I remember what it is, but if not there’s no required fields missing. If all I want is to quickly add calories or macros, I can just add those and be done with it. Like a couple taps and a single screen just to record calories or carbs or something. At least it’s better than a note telling myself to add it as a full blown later (spoiler alert: I probably won’t do that).
The form for quick adding nutrients could also leverage the same tool you guys already have for adding custom foods, so I could just snap a photo of the nutrition label and BAM - data is tracked. Maybe put that botton as a major option under ADD, right next to scan barcode. Or else have both the barcode and label scanners separate under a SCAN option. Currently, users can’t access the label scanner import feature at all. Only from scanning a barcode that isn’t recognized. Why??? Why isn’t this option available when making a custom food? That way I can quickly add any recipe or food that gives me a nutrition label (but doesn’t have a barcode). Rather than manually inputting all of that stuff. Imagine hitting ADD, then SCAN, then LABEL, and there’s all the nutrition and serving size data. You then have the option to quick add (just dump the info into your diary and skip having to name it, save it, go through several screens) or to save the info as a custom food if it’s something you’re going to potentially use again.
This would be a life saver… because most of the time, I’m not eating things with barcodes. But I’m also not just eating whole foods out of hand that are easy to add. Sure, if I’m having an avocado, that’s easy to track. Tap, tap, done. But… not when I sit down for dinner and am looking at a bowl of some curry I made. That’s 75% of my eating - things I made or were made for me that are difficult to track. Adding recipes for everything I make is SO time consuming. And it’s next to impossible when my partner does the cooking/meal prep. I tried asking my partner to create recipes in Cronometer for everything she makes… that didn’t work out well. I can get her to share a link to whatever recipe she used, but using the recipe importer and/or manually importing everything is a huge chore. It’s not practical or sustainable. So, I often give up and backslide into blind eating. It’s not like I’m eating the same meals over and over again. We often make recipes once and move on.
But… A surprising amount of the time, the recipes have nutrition info listed. Instead of creating a custom recipe and worry about every single ingredient, it would be nice to have an option of just snapping a pic of the nutrition info/label or if all else fails just punch in at least the macros. That would be a game changer. If I could just snap a photo of the info to create the food (if I’m going to use it more than once) or snap a photo to just import those details into a single entry without “Next”ing my way through multiple screens, it would be so much easier. It would take away any excuse for not recording something (or worse yet having to feel like “do I even want to eat this, because then I’ll have to add it into Chronometer later”.
This seems like you guys have all the stuff to make this happen. Just allow a quick add feature to manually add nutrients for a one-time situation and add an option to import the details by photo when/if a label is available. Then simply add an option to do the same when importing custom foods, rather than only having this feature hidden behind the scan a barcode option.
Comments
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Hey, thanks so much for the feedback! We may have a feature that will make this a bit easier, try searching for 'Quick Add - Calories' or 'Quick Add - Carbohydrates' in the food search. It's not exactly what you're describing, but it could help
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Oh, WOW! You’re right… that’s not a perfect solution, but it is definitely a great bandaid. It would be great to have this all in one screen and I wouldn’t have known this existed or found it without you telling me, but at least this gives me something quick and dirty.
