Why We Built Macronote

The chicken breast problem

Open any of the big trackers, search “chicken breast”, and you are offered dozens of entries that disagree with each other. Some are raw, some cooked, some are somebody’s guess typed in years ago. Nothing tells you which is which. You pick one, you accept it, and your diary fills up with numbers that nobody stands behind.

That was the part we couldn’t get past. Not the effort of tracking — the fact that the effort bought you a number you had no particular reason to believe.

Write it down like a person

So the input is a sentence. You write what you had, the way you’d say it to someone, and the app does the arithmetic.

Typed, spoken, or photographed: it is the same idea either way. The app reads the sentence, so you never have to learn the database.

Every number says where it came from

Log a Nando’s meal and the figures come from Nando’s own published nutrition page, with a link through to it. Log a chicken breast and it is matched to a verified food database. When we have to estimate — and sometimes we do — the entry says so on its face, not in a footnote.

You shouldn’t have to take our word for any of it. That is more or less the whole idea.

Why it’s a paid app

Macronote costs £4.99 a month, or £39.99 a year. We would rather be paid by the people using it than by advertisers, because the other model ends with somebody buying the right to influence what your food diary tells you.

It also means we have no reason to keep you in the app. Writing a meal down should take a moment, and then you should be able to leave.

What’s next

Macronote comes to iOS first, with Android after. We are starting with the plain version of the idea: write a meal down, get numbers you can check. What people ask for will decide the rest.