

Show HN: Newtrien – nutrition facts labels for recipe blogs - victorstanciu
https://newtrien.com

======
victorstanciu
After years of working for various web agencies and software companies, and
then more years working as a full-time freelancer, I finally took the plunge
and launched my first SaaS, newtrien.com.

While developing the website was time-consuming (especially since I'm doing it
solo - programming, "design", etc.), I feel the hard part has only just begun,
because I have zero experience on how to promote a service. But it doesn't
matter, because even just launching the service was a great personal success
for me, since I have a huge history of starting personal projects and not
actually finishing them (who doesn't, right?).

So anyway, newtrien.com is a website where people who own recipe blogs or
websites can easily create nutrition facts labels for their recipes, and them
embed those labels on their site. It currently has a database of about 800.000
nutritional facts for over 10.000 ingredients, but I plan to import more
nutritional databases in the short future, as well as build a feature where
users can add their own custom ingredients, on the off chance that some exotic
new ingredient is missing from the database.

I am looking for feedback on pretty much everything: business idea, website
usability, design, etc. Thanks!

------
fractallyte
This is excellent! It's well presented and clear, and I can imagine a huge
market for this kind of service.

A few comments/suggestions:

The FDA's idea of carbohydrate as a 'dietary fiber' is decidedly odd; would it
be possible to generate labels for other regulatory bodies (eg. for countries
in the EU)?

When creating a physical label, displaying the dimensions would be very
useful.

Instead of having to enter each ingredient with corresponding quantities, it
would be much more convenient for the end user to simply feed in a complete
recipe. It's not much fun parsing plain text, but perhaps you could accept
various formats such as CookML, RecipeBook XML, REML, hrecipe, JSON...

yummly ([http://www.yummly.com/](http://www.yummly.com/)) might also be
interested in what you've created...

~~~
victorstanciu
Thanks a lot for the reply!

 _would it be possible to generate labels for other regulatory bodies (eg. for
countries in the EU)?_

Hmm, it appears I have to make this feature a little clearer, because I have
already implemented two of the most common EU labels, the GDA pills
([http://i.imgur.com/ZROSP6l.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZROSP6l.png)) and the
tabular format
([http://i.imgur.com/O5OnepQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/O5OnepQ.png)). The EU
labels even take into account the fact that the daily recommended intake
values are different in the EU than the US.

 _When creating a physical label, displaying the dimensions would be very
useful._

Good point, people who package food will definitely be interested in the
physical dimensions of the label, even though the exported PDFs are scalable.

 _It 's not much fun parsing plain text, but perhaps you could accept various
formats such as CookML, RecipeBook XML, REML, hrecipe_

I had no idea these formats existed until now, to be honest. I will surely
look into them.

 _yummly might also be interested in what you 've created..._

They already have nutritional information on each recipe page:
[http://i.imgur.com/ZlIGUqi.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZlIGUqi.png). There are
quite a few large websites that already provide nutrition labels, that's one
of the reasons I came to this idea, I thought that small food bloggers would
be interested in having them too.

Thanks again!

~~~
fractallyte
_it appears I have to make this feature a little clearer_

No, my mistake. The options were quite clear, I just wasn't paying attention.
However, you could modify the text on the front page: "Label your products
with FDA-compliant nutrition facts" to mention the other options.

Also, I just noticed the magnifying glass effect on the front page. It's a
great way to combine a preview with an actual screenshot - very neat!

------
misterjinx
I just wanted to point out, that even though I'm not in the target, the
product looks excellent. I can see by the level of presentation and the way
labels are created that you've put a lot of time and effort in developing
this, there aren't many products these days that show so much accuracy from
early stages. Great job!

