
Show HN: Recipelab, a simple nutrition calculator / recipe analyzer - phugoid
https://recipelab.org/
======
tboughen
I like the concept and the execution is pretty solid - I particularly like the
RDA % and bar charts for a meal. I have a few thoughts though:

1) Search found all the ingredients I needed or pretty close approximations
which was cool. Multiple units of measurement was an excellent choice. Food
data looks USA - it would be helpful to know that as a UK user.

2) I had to make a username and password which will put off some potential
users. Why not make it log in with Facebook/Google as an option?

3) I entered a quantity of tortillas and couldn't amend it without deleting
the item. Was I doing something wrong?

4) As an active 6'2" man I suspect I need more calories than average. How
about activity level/height/weight options? Kudos for having 'pregnant' and
'Breastfeeding' as options. However they would be more powerful as flags - my
wife is both pregnant and breastfeeding! Or even 'add person' so one can look
at nutritional info for cooking for a family.

I'm interested to see how this tool evolves! Good work!

~~~
phugoid
Thanks!

1) Yes, it uses a USA gov' database. But I'm curious about why it looks
American to you. Could you please elaborate?

2) To be frank, this is django's registration system, off-the-shelf (least
effort). If I see enough interest in the site I will add simplified login.
Thanks for highlighting it.

3) You did nothing wrong. I've stripped the interface down to the most basic
functions.

4) You're totally correct. Adjusting the targets for body shape and activity
is a priority item. As far as pregnant + breastfeeding, the source database
has data for each but not both.

------
mdergosits
Is there a comparison to MyFitnessPal? I use that and it's able to import
recipes from a link, or scan products using a barcode. How are you getting all
of the data for different products? I tried looking up my two favorite brands
of yogurt and they weren't there.

~~~
phugoid
Thanks for checking it out. In my understanding, MyFitnessPal is oriented
toward the fitness crowd, with a focus on daily energy consumption.

After a lot of exploration I decided to limit the scope as much as possible
and target home cooks and food bloggers, with a focus on recipes.

I spent a few weeks of my spare time trying to get the parsing of free-text
recipes to work (essentially MFP's import from link). The results were decent,
but I realized that if it's only 90% accurate I still need a lot of user
interface functions (like MFP) to let users edit/fix the inaccurate bits. It
started smelling bad so I decided to strip it down to its most basic function.

I have no plans for now to use databases of branded products - the ones I saw
were quite expensive and would be more useful for sites like MyFitnessPal,
perhaps less useful for recipes/cooking.

~~~
nodamage
> I spent a few weeks of my spare time trying to get the parsing of free-text
> recipes to work (essentially MFP's import from link). The results were
> decent, but I realized that if it's only 90% accurate I still need a lot of
> user interface functions (like MFP) to let users edit/fix the inaccurate
> bits. It started smelling bad so I decided to strip it down to its most
> basic function.

As a regular MyFitnessPal user I have to say, their recipe importer leaves a
lot to be desired. Whenever I use it, I inevitably have to make corrections
because it mapped the parsed ingredient to the wrong item. (And their UI for
making corrections is not particularly great either.)

It's probably a good idea that you decided not to go down this road.

------
plg
If I have to sign up to try it, I will not try it. I'm sure I'm not the only
one.

Yes I could sign up with an anonymous email address over a tor connection.

but I would resent that I was forced to do it

~~~
wraheem
This got me as well. At least have a more detailed "how it works" type page.
Maybe even a sample working page to try out the features.

Someone even commented above about using a google/twitter/facebook
integration. I'd be more willing to do it from there.

~~~
phugoid
I've changed it so that you can try the calculator without creating an
account. Login is only required for saving recipes or for changing the
nutrition targets.

------
palidanx
I'm pretty familiar with the USDA SR dataset, and here are my thoughts
(examining data with one of my experiments diarytail.com)

1) People in the enterprise space will be willing to deal with the weird
nuances of the USDA-SR data. For example writing 'beef cooked' vs' 'beef raw'.

2) In the general consumer space, there is a huge problem in getting the
general public to find ingredients they use. I found lots of people typing in
brand name ingredients not matching what is in the USDA data set.

To me, the problem is partially solved with My Fitness Pal's huge dataset of
user generated data. However the flip side is it is missing most of the micros
as they are entered via a nutrition label.

Another solution might be to reference nutritionix.com 's dataset (I think the
joyapp.com uses it also)

~~~
phugoid
Very nice site (diarytail.com), by the way.

Unfortunately nutritionix has only basic nutritional data as well, the sort of
thing you find on a product label. Not bad but not great. Have a look at their
sample data. Plus it's around 10k/year or 50k/license.

I'm thinking home cooks would get a lot of value from the tool, and reasonably
good data even if they use raw instead of cooked (as an example).

------
overcast
Interesting, is there any plans on opening up your calculator/analyzer to an
API. I just launched [http://imadefood.com](http://imadefood.com) a week ago,
and there could be some mutual beneficial scenarios here. Let me know!

~~~
phugoid
Nice site!

I don't think I can offer much of an API. As I mentioned in another comment, I
gave up on trying to parse a free-text recipe. I avoid a lot of headache by
directing users to enter ingredients from the database list only.

That being said, I'm open to talk about it - see my HN profile for email.

~~~
icc97
I like your imadefood site. Reminds me of a kind of jsfiddle for recipies.

edit: @phugold - I like the idea of your site, but you might want to take note
of the ability to immediately see recipies without having to register. It's
great to be able to just dive right in rather than hitting a wall requiring
login.

~~~
overcast
Thank you! Someone also mentioned "github for recipes" as well. A bit more
simplistic than that, but I'll take it! :)

------
evo_9
Very cool. I wonder does this take cooking into account? Meaning you slice up
a potato and fry it you end up with different nutritional results than baking
a whole potato for example.

~~~
phugoid
For many ingredients, you have the option of selecting raw or cooked. For
popular items like potatoes there are dozens of options including fried,
baked, salted, etc.

Try entering "potato fried" in the search box.

------
hluska
I would have signed up and tried the service, but I'm allergic to quotes like
the following in a privacy policy, particularly when they are not disclosed on
the sign up page.

 _If you are a registered user of recipelab.org and have supplied your email
address, recipelab.org may occasionally send you an email to tell you about
new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s
going on with recipelab.org and our products. If you send us a request (for
example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve
the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request
or to help us support other users._

Contrast that with:

 _When you register for recipelab.org, we collect certain personal information
(ie - your email address and name). We will only use this email address to
send you {monthly||weekly||daily} requests for feedback or updates on the
product._

 _If you send us a support request, we may publish it to help us support other
users. However, before we publish it, we will strip out any personally
identifiable information._

~~~
a3n
> we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to
> your request or to help us support other users.

That rubs me a little the wrong way too.

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joefarish
Sounds similar to what Wolfram Alpha can do:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+slices+of+bread+%2B+1...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+slices+of+bread+%2B+1+slice+swiss+cheese+%2B+1%2F2+avocado+%2B+1+slice+tomato&lk=3)

------
kentbrew
"Substitutions" is misspelled on the front page.

~~~
phugoid
Thanks, fixed.

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hammock
This exists already in a pretty intelligent way, check out
[http://www.caloriecount.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php](http://www.caloriecount.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php)
and paste in an ingredients list.

~~~
phugoid
Yes, that site does a pretty good job. At first glance the copy/paste approach
is promising - in practice it's a bit more hassle and less precise than what
recipelab does in my opinion, plus I'm starting from a clutter-free UI that
works great on mobile devices.

------
pbnjay
I'd really prefer seeing a full example before signing up. You're not
providing enough information about what I'll get out of this save a few tiny
cropped screenshots.

~~~
phugoid
Do you think a full screenshot might be interesting?

But a simple screenshot image would not work for all cases, because the
calculator page renders differently on mobile devices. On the other hand, if I
offer a full working version without sign-up, there would be no reason to sign
up. If I show a "frozen" version of the full calculator, normal users might
get the wrong idea from that as well.

~~~
mryan
No, a screenshot would not be interesting enough IMHO.

It seems that you want to prevent people from experiencing your site without
signing up first. Why is this? If you hide the value of your site behind the
sign-up link, hardly anybody will bother signing up.

With a site like this, I would suggest enabling all features for anonymous
users, except the ability to save recipes. Users can play around with the site
and make their own recipe. The natural step after creating a test recipe would
be to save it - this would be the best place to prompt for signup. I'd also
recommend changing your on-boarding flow so that I do not need to confirm my
email address immediately.

~~~
phugoid
I've changed it so that you can try the calculator without creating an
account. Login is only required for saving recipes or for changing the
nutrition targets. Thanks again for the advice.

