You asked! We listened. Check out our new – and seriously improved – food search! We are thrilled to provide you with the most efficient way to log your foods ever! Check out how to enter your foods in record time below.
To add a food to your diary, open the bottom console by using the + button in the bottom center of your screen. Tap Add Food to use the text based search, or Scan Food to use the Barcode scanner.
Select Add Food to open the text based search. The list will automatically populate with the most frequently used foods you have added to your diary. Tap on the food’s name to open more options such as serving size and diary group choices, or simply tap the check box to add the listing to the foods you would like to add to your diary.
You can search for a food directly, or you can filter your search results further. If you are unable to find a food with a text based search, tap the barcode icon to the left of the text box for a shortcut to our barcode scanner.
Start typing in the name of the food item you want to add. For example, type ‘oats’ to start seeing suggestions. You can enter keyword fragments separated by spaces to narrow your search. For example, typing ‘soup car’ will find results such as ‘Carrot Soup’. You can also search by food number or barcode number. Results are ranked by a combination of how well the name matches your search, and how popular the item is.
Multi-Add
If you want to add multiple items to your diary at once, choose to Enable Multi-Add from the Filter Menu by selecting the Filter Icon. After that you can simply check the boxes of the foods you wish to add simultaneously. You can see a summary of all the foods you are about to add to your diary by tapping on the bottom drawer. You can see the number of foods you are about to add to your diary indicated in the Review Items button. Once you are happy with your selection, click Add to Diary.
Food Search Filters
Limit your search results to find foods more quickly by selecting a food search category. Use the Filter Icon on the right to see more options.
Categories
- All: This tab shows all the search results for the text entered in the search box.
- Favorites: This tab shows all the foods you have previously marked as favorites.
- Common Foods: This tab shows results from our highest quality nutrition databases and will typically have the most nutrition information available for a particular food. To get the most nutrition information using Cronometer, we recommend searching for whole foods, and generic versions of your brand name products in this search tab.
- Supplements: This tab shows all results that match the text entered that belong to the Supplements category.
- Brands: This tab displays results that are brand name products i.e. store-bought brands and common products you find on the shelves of the supermarket. These results often have fewer nutritional data because food manufacturers typically only report the nutrients required by law on the nutrition label. Foods found in this tab will often have a Better Alternative marked by one of our curation staff, offering a similar food with more complete nutritional data for you to add to your diary instead.
- Restaurants: This tab displays foods ordered at a restaurant. Many restaurants provide some basic calorie and nutritional data for the food they serve, but like the Brands category, that data is usually limited.
- Custom: This tab displays all the custom foods and recipes that you have created as well as the custom foods and recipes that have been shared with you by other users.
Database
You can learn more about our data sources in the corresponding section of our user manual.
Entering Serving Details
Once you have found the food you are looking for, select it from the list. Select the serving size and quantity. Gold users can also choose to add a Timestamp and Diary Group.
In this section you can see some basic information about calories and the macronutrient breakdown. Before adding a food to your diary, you can easily see if this listing is a good source of data by looking at how many nutrients it contains and where the data is obtained from. Hover your mouse over the circle graph to view the number of calories from each macronutrient in your food.
- Select XX Listed Nutrients to view full nutrient breakdown
Better Alternatives
Some foods have a better alternative with more nutrients marked. Our curation team is hard at work identifying products in the brand database that have generic equivalents with better data. If they’ve tagged a food as having a better alternative, we show you a handy link to the better option.
Have a look at this Blog Post for some tips and tricks to keep in mind when choosing foods!
Favorites
If you use this food often, mark it as a favorite, so that you can easily find it in the favorites tab at a later date! To mark a food as a favorite, use the menu found in the top right corner of the add food screen, then select Add to Favourites from the populated menu. This food will now appear when you are using the Favorites category filter.
Tip: Report an issue using this menu as well! If you find a problem with the data in the listing you are viewing, let us know! Learn more in the Report An Issue article
To remove a food as a favorite, simply navigate back to this screen and perform the same action. You will be able to see if the food is a favorite or not as an orange star will indicate favorites next to the name in this screen.
Click Save to add this item to your list of foods you wish to add to your diary at this time.
