We’ve all been there. You’re at Nando’s with mates, you order the peri-peri chicken with spicy rice, and then you open whichever tracker you use.
Search the dish and a wall of near-identical entries comes back. Which one? Any database that takes user submissions ends up with a spread like this for a single meal:
You scroll. You guess. You give up and log “grilled chicken — 400 cal” and hope for the best.
The problem is user-submitted databases. Anyone can add entries, few are verified, and portion sizes are inconsistent. You end up with dozens of entries for the same meal, all with different calorie counts, and no way to know which one is correct.
Most of the big chains publish this themselves, and the pages are public:
| Restaurant | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| Nando’s | nandos.co.uk/food/nutrition |
| McDonald’s | mcdonalds.com → Nutrition Calculator |
| Chipotle | chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator |
| Chick-fil-A | chick-fil-a.com/nutrition-allergens |
| Subway | subway.com → Nutrition Info |
| Wagamama | wagamama.com/allergen-information |
| Pret | pret.co.uk/en-GB/food-and-drink |
The problem is that finding these pages, navigating allergy matrices and PDF downloads, and cross-referencing portion sizes takes ages. Nobody wants to do this at the dinner table.
If you’re tracking manually, here are some things that help:
This is the bit we built Macronote for. Write “Nando’s half chicken with spicy rice” and we fetch the published figures ourselves, with a link through to the page they came from. Nobody’s guess involved but the restaurant’s own figures.
Where a figure is estimated rather than sourced, the entry says so. You should be able to tell the difference at a glance.
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