Apple's food logging won't compete with apps like Foodnoms

I'm very intrigued by the rumor that Visual Intelligence will be able to be used as a food log. I love Foodnoms and I doubt Apple will be building anything close to that kind of interface, if any, for food logging.

So, apps like Foodnoms are likely safe, for now.

It all comes down to what Apple Health looks like in iOS 27. The whole app needs an overhaul, and if nutrition logging via Visual Intelligence is possible, then the food section of Health needs rethought.

Maybe Apple could even lay it out more like a food journal than a list of numbers and values. Really, that list is virtually useless and tells me nothing and there doesn't appear to be any active use of that data anywhere in the Health app.

Imagine opening Apple Health and going to a food tab and seeing your overall nutritional health with some highlighted values at the top. Scroll down and you enter a timeline view of everything you've logged, including the photo you captured for the entry.

People do like their food photos, and making it so users can log their calories via an image and attaching it to a historic record could be interesting. Let users leave notes about the meal and share the entry to socials or Apple Journal, and you've got a winning formula. I know I'd be visiting that tab every day.

Well, that is if Apple was actually working on food logging via food photos.

The rumor specifically calls out nutrition label scanning, which is an even more limited version of food logging. It puts a lot of the work on the user, while Foodnoms has a user-created database that can be searched. You do have the option to scan a barcode or label to create a new food, but it isn't required.

Foodnoms takes things much further by using AI tools powered by ChatGPT to analyze a food photo to log nutrition data. It isn't perfect, but I'm not looking for exact values anyway.

I asked Foodnoms creator Ryan Ashcraft if they had considered using Apple Foundation Models for food image interpretation. They replied that it is far from capable.

I'm not sure Apple will go the food scanning route, at least not yet. Nutrition label scanning is a good start, but it is also the bare minimum. Apps like Foodnoms will still be crucial.

If Apple is going to start taking on food logging directly, it needs to rethink Health. There were already rumors of this with Health+, but that service was canned in favor of producing the incoming features slowly and for free.

I'm excited to see what is in store for Apple Health and food logging in iOS 27.