*Suggest Food* What Works (and What Doesn't)...
So... the new(ish) Suggest Food feature is less helpful than I think we would have hoped. The old version was better. Why?
So here's what's good about this version: filters - love being able to tell it what kind of diet I'm on, but more options would be more functional; being able to filter down to just breakfast options is helpful if you know it'll be easy to prepare something in breakfast family based on the food in your pantry regardless of the time of day; excluding major allergens is awesome; being able to suggest foods from your custom list is great!!
Here's what needs work (from my perspective):
We need to be able to filter by other common dietary needs (like low sugar or salt). Ostensibly the AI will take into account your dietary needs based on the goals you've set up in your macros/micros. But in reality it doesn't do this at all.
The categories, while nice, are slim. Why can't we filter down to smoothies, or soup, or casseroles? It's because the system recommends meals but doesn't tell you how those things are made. It's looking at nutrition from... somewhere? Where did that meal/recipe come from and why can't we access it to replicate it?
Common exclusions are good, but custom exclusions would be better.
When this new AI option came out, I was excited, but it just seems to be getting worse. I've seen (and commented on) another post about the blank entries (that entry posited that the entries are whole foods, but I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion). Honestly, being able to toggle down to just displaying whole foods would be an amazing improvement. I love the meal options for inspiration, but when I'm trying to fill holes in my diet for the day, I need to really know how to get there and an option like this is supposed to make that journey faster than checking all my nutritional gaps individually.
Overall, I think this is a neat idea that just isn't working out but I haven't seen any conversation what the plan for this feature is and/or whether or not it's still in dev.