Log a meal by photographing the plate
You finish a meal and you want it logged before the plate is even cleared — but searching a database for “chicken burrito bowl” and guessing at every component is exactly the friction that makes people stop tracking. The meal wasn’t one thing; it was rice and beans and chicken and cheese and guac, in proportions you’d have to invent.
The workflow in Kapel
1. Photograph the plate. Open the composer, take the photo. You don’t pick a “meal” mode or search anything first — you capture what’s in front of you.
2. Kapel composes the meal. It reads the photo into a set of foods, and breaks each food into database-resolved ingredients with estimated grams. Barcodes in the frame resolve to exact packaged products. The result isn’t one calorie number — it’s a meal with real per-ingredient protein, carbs, and fat.
3. Drill in and check. Tap a food to see its ingredients; tap an ingredient to see its full per-100g profile and whether it was matched to a known record or estimated from the photo. The provenance is visible, so a wrong match is easy to spot.
4. Correct with a note. Anything off? Say what changed — “no cheese”, “double chicken”, “that was a large” — and Kapel revises the meal in place. Corrections are a note, not a form.
What makes this work
The engine underneath is the food model: every food is a composition of ingredients, and nutrition is computed up from them. That’s why a photographed meal can carry real macros and a per-ingredient breakdown instead of a single opaque figure — and why correcting one ingredient updates the totals correctly.
Handled honestly
- Portions are estimates. Vision can’t weigh your plate. Kapel is explicit about which ingredients are estimated, and correcting them is a note away.
- Barcode coverage depends on the product and your browser. Detection runs in-browser (best on Chrome/Android); an unrecognisable or absent product falls back to a vision estimate.
- The database is young. A note may estimate an ingredient rather than match it — and it’s flagged when it does.
Try it
Kapel is in alpha. Photograph your next meal and see it come back as ingredients, not a number.
FAQ
What if the portions are wrong?
They're estimates until you correct them. Add a note like "only half the fries" or "large latte, oat milk" and Kapel revises the meal in place.
Does photographing a packaged product use the barcode?
Yes. If a barcode is in the frame, Kapel resolves that item as a packaged product rather than guessing from the image.
Can I still type or speak a meal instead?
Yes. Photo, voice, and text are all capture inputs, and you can combine them in one note.