Barcode scanning is a slow, miserable interface that doesn't work for anything you didn't buy in a package. Restaurant food, leftovers, home cooking, fruit — all useless. CalBurndown skips the scanner entirely. Three faster ways:
1. Type it in plain English
Tap + → Food & drink → type whatever you ate:
two scrambled eggs, slice of sourdough, black coffee
The AI parses it into items, looks each one up in a 1.4M-row open food database (Open Food Facts + USDA), and gives you a calorie estimate with macros. You can edit each line before saving.
One field handles food and drinks together. If you write "burger and a large coke," the coke is detected as a beverage and logged to your fluid intake as a drink — it counts once toward calories, never twice. So "handful of almonds and a vanilla iced latte" lands the almonds as food and the latte as a drink in a single log.
When it's accurate:
- Common foods with standard portions ("medium banana", "8 oz chicken breast")
- Restaurant chains by name ("Chipotle chicken bowl with brown rice")
- Specific brand names ("Trader Joe's tikka masala")
When to be skeptical:
- "A sandwich" — too vague
- Mixed plates with no portion sizes — better to use the photo path
2. Say it out loud
Same parser, voice input — using your phone's own keyboard. Tap + → Food & drink, tap into the text field, then tap the microphone key on your keyboard (next to the spacebar on iOS, top row on Gboard) and just talk. Your phone fills the field with the transcription; tap Parse with AI → and it's handled exactly like typing. You'll see a "tap the 🎤 on your keyboard to dictate" reminder under the box.
Useful when:
- You're driving (don't actually drive and type)
- You're cooking and have wet hands
- You ate enough things that typing is annoying
There's no separate in-app voice button — the keyboard's dictation is already on every phone, faster, and more accurate than anything we'd bolt on. Whether the audio stays on-device depends on your phone's keyboard settings, not us; the transcribed text is all CalBurndown ever sees.
3. Photograph it
Tap + → Food & drink → camera. Snap a normal photo of your plate. The AI:
- Identifies each visible food
- Estimates portion sizes (more accurate with a hand calibration)
- Returns calories + macros per item
Add more than one shot of the same meal. Tap + again to take another angle — or photograph the nutrition label or receipt alongside the plate. We combine them into one entry, so a label shot pins exact calories and vitamins while the plate photo handles portion.
Missed the label the first time? On the meal review screen, photo logs get an "📷 Add nutrition label photo & re-scan" button. Snap the label, and the app re-runs the parse with your original photos plus the new label — picking up calories and micronutrients the first pass couldn't see.
When the photo path wins:
- Restaurant plates where you don't know the recipe
- Home cooking with mystery ingredients
- Anything where you'd otherwise just guess
EXIF and GPS are stripped before upload. We don't see your kitchen or your location, only the cropped food image.
Which method should you use?
| Situation | Best method |
|---|---|
| Quick snack you know cold | Type |
| Restaurant entree | Photo |
| Driving | Voice |
| Mixed plate at a friend's | Photo |
| Brand-name packaged food | Type |
| A handful of nuts | Type |
Accuracy expectations
Aim for ±15% per meal. Over a week, errors largely cancel out — what matters for fat loss is consistent direction, not perfect daily numbers. If you're routinely off by more than 25%, it's almost always portion-size error, not the calorie database.
That's why hand-based portion estimation matters more than tracking to the gram.
Save the foods you eat often
On the review screen you can tap "Save facts only — don't log this now" to add an item's nutrition to your personal library without logging a meal. Anything you log gets remembered too. Next time you eat that food, the app fills in your saved calories and macros automatically — scaled to the portion — instead of re-guessing. Over a few weeks your repeat meals get faster and more consistent.
See your personal nutrition library for how it works and how to edit saved items.