Working With Food in HeyApple
HeyApple sources its food from various reputable databases. Even so, it doesn’t aim to provide an exhaustive list of all the possible foods you might find at any store in the world. The app focuses on natural, unprocessed foods, wich make up most of the database.
We also decided to keep the database free from duplicates if the only difference between two foods is the store brand or the packaging. So, let’s say you’re looking for gouda: you won’t find an entry for Trader Joe’s gouda and another one for Walmart’s and so on. Instead, there will be a single entry for gouda cheese.
HeyApple doesn’t let you create new food items for the same reason. Any food tracker that allows users to add food on their own tends to suffer from the same problem after a while: Lots of duplicates with contradicting or incomplete information and users not knowing which one of all these entries to trust. Keeping the database clean then demands a lot of time from the developers; time that would be better spent developing new features.
The only exception to this rule is food that is scanned via barcode scanners. You can learn more about that in the section on scanning food.
