Making Food Fit for the Web

[Commentary] Food is the next frontier for mobile, big data and web services to change our lives, but in order to make that happen, we need open standards, or any kind of standards for identifying ingredients, importing recipes and tracking nutritional data.

Recently three different services have come together to make realize how crappy the online food experience is and what it could be. In San Francisco, I played with the Meal Snap application by Daily Burn on a friend’s phone and thought it was the coolest thing. You can use the app to snap a picture of your food and the app returns an estimate of how many calories it has. It’s simple, easy and fun in a way that counting calories isn't. Fitbit is a that device tracks activity, sleep and offers an estimate for calories burned. For $99, it’s like a web-enabled pedometer. But it could be so much more. The site allows me to track my food intake and calories consumed using a decently-sized database, but it’s such a pain to go to the site and enter. What if you could snap a picture of your food and send it over? The final piece of this puzzle is the Food on the Table service which tracks grocery deals, allows users to submit their recipes, then delivers a meal plan that helps them use recipes to incorporate food that’s on sale. From there, users can generate a shopping list. I think it’s an extraordinarily disruptive service because it takes the act of applying data and technology to disrupt an industry, much like TiVo aggregated data on a variety of shows and channels, added a hard drive and changed the way people watch TV.