Have you ever daydreamed about having a dietitian on call to help you navigate the confounding labyrinth of nutritional tenets like: “healthy eating,” “dieting,” “weight loss,” and “meal tracking”? What’s more, have you ever fantasized that this illustrious nutrition guru would offer you their expertise for free?
For most, having an esteemed dietitian at their beck and call is just that—a daydream. However, what isn’t a daydream, is the convenient and economical alternative of having a preferred digital dietary resource available to you 24 hours a day. Whether you enjoy snapping photos of your food or logging your calorie consumption the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, food journaling apps are an efficient modern method of tracking your food intake throughout the day.
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With so many food journaling apps to choose from, it may be difficult to narrow down the app that suits your lifestyle, personality, and nutritional goals. While modes of dieting often vary, the aims are virtually unchangeable: feel better, look better, and lose weight. Whatever your personal nutritional goals are, rest assured that there is an app to help make those goals achievable.
The food journal is basically another kind of journal in which you are reminded of what you ate for the past days, or week, or month, or even years. You may also check out prayer journal templates. It serves as a reminder because the general purpose of a food journal is for one to look what he or she eats and how much of it within a given week.
Here is the skinny on the best food journaling apps for your individual weight loss or overall nutritional improvement goals:
MyFitnessPal
This app is one of the most sought-after apps in the food diary game. The MyFitnessPal app boasts a food database comprising over two million items. Indicate your current weight, what your target weight is, height, age, activity level, exercise regimen, and how many pounds you would like to shed per week, and the MyFitnessPal app will assist you with staying on track toward your target weight loss goal. In addition to logging what you eat and what you’ve had to drink throughout the day, this app tracks your fitness regimen and provides support and motivation from fellow users. The MyFitnessPal app is available for free through iTunes and Google Play.
Fitocracy Macros
Macros is shorthand for macronutrients—specifically the nutrients that your body needs in copious amounts (hence the term “macro”). Carbohydrates, fat, and protein are the holy trinity of the macro diet. So, whether your journaling focus is on carbs, fat, or protein this app will tell you how much of each nutrient you need. The Macro Coach feature will also scan barcodes on food packages to find the nutrition facts of your favorite foods for you. The Fitocracy Macros app is available for free through iTunes.
Keto Diet Meal Plan
Weight loss is not the only reason the high-fat, low carb ketogenic diet is touted as a diet actually worth its weight in results (no pun intended)—research also suggests that the ketogenic diet may be an effective regulation tool for improving your mental health by decreasing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ADHD. The Keto Diet Meal Plan app provides you with meal plans within your carb limits. An expedient and convenient feature of this app takes care of the tedious carb-counting work of traditional dieting for you. The Keto Diet Meal Plan app is available for free through iTunes.
Rise Up
Perhaps dieting, exercise, and better nutrition are not the only concerns you have about keeping close tabs on how much you eat. Body image is also a fundamental concern of those seeking to improve their health. Rise Up is an app designed with eating disorder sufferers in mind. Its basic principles of self-monitoring are derived from tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In addition to logging your meals, you can add distinct details like: the location of where you ate, whom you were with, and your mood at the time you ate. The Rise Up app is available for free through iTunes and Google Play.
Yazio
Whether your desire is to lose weight, acquire more muscle, or to just feel healthier, this app caters to the versatility of the average individual’s weight loss goals. Utilize this app to track your daily activities and manage your food diary. A built-in bar code scanner enables you to efficiently search for the food you want to include in your log. The Yazio app is available for free through iTunes and Google Play.
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See How You Eat
The rise of social media colossuses like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook has taught us two basic truths: (a) selfies are an indelible feature of the modern digital landscape and (b) as a runner-up to taking pictures of themselves, people love snapping and sharing photos of food. The See How You Eat app was designed with visual learners in mind. Using this app, you can see at a glance all of the food you have consumed that day. Visual reminders of what you’ve had to eat on a given day create a compelling argument for making healthier choices. This app promotes healthy eating at regular intervals to boost energy and abate impulsive food choices that can wreak havoc on your longterm nutritional goals. The See How You Eat app is available for free through iTunes and Google Play.
MyPlate
In addition to an online food diary, this app promotes a comprehensive database of 625,000 foods and 1,500 fitnessrelated items that enable users to monitor their daily calorie consumption as well as how many calories they burn. Calories can be tracked over a specified period and delineations of how those calories were acquired or burned are also provided. The MyPlate app is available for free through iTunes.
YouAte
This app takes the tedium, guilt, and ambiguity out of classic food journaling. YouAte encourages users to steer their focus away from traditional carb counting and calorie emphasis by simply taking a closer look at the food choices they are making.
Maintaining a food journal on this app is as convenient as snapping a photo of everything you munch on throughout the day. Reviewing snapshots of the food they eat motivates users to consistently evaluate whether the choices they’re making are really helping them to achieve their goals. The YouAte app is available for free through iTunes.
Pukapal
The Pukapal app is an imaginative and interactive spin on the traditional food diary app. Users of this app “feed their puka” by documenting and sharing their meals and by liking their favorite dishes. Pukapal allows users to upload photos of their food to their timeline, add captions, and earn rewards by sharing and inviting friends to join. This collaborative app also offers weekly timeline suggestions to motivate and inspire users to continue tracking their culinary adventures. The Pukapal app is available for free through iTunes.
My Food Diary
This app takes a holistic approach to helping you achieve your weight loss goal. My Food Diary features seven different methods for logging meals and a vast database of 80,000 expertly complied food items. If you wish to share your account with a spouse, friend, or significant other you can also log recipes that you and your companion commonly make. My Food Diary provides color-coded nutrition reports daily and you can even assemble your own graphs using personally selected data. The My Food Diary is available for free to members of the MyFoodDiary website.
So, whether you are a snap-and-post food journal enthusiast or more of the meticulous and traditional recordkeeper variety—maintaining a log of what you eat just got easier, more convenient, more modern, and more fun with the creation of these vastly popular food tracking apps. Nutritional goals may vary from person to person, but rates of achieving long-term success can grow exponentially when you have resources and collaborative feedback at your fingertips.
Trying to figure out how profitable a new menu will be? Not feeling confident about ingredient costs? We’ve got you covered with the release of the Menu Recipe Upscale and Food Costing Spreadsheet (patent pending).
Using this cost and recipe scaling tool couldn’t be simpler, but there are a few details we wanted to take a moment to walk you through in this tutorial to help unleash the power of this Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet (.xlsx).
Let’s take a look at the at the reasons you need to utilize a tool like in your business and how start using the tool right away. This tool applies to restaurants, food trucks, and specialty food makers alike. Let’s begin!
Table of Contents:
Why use the recipe cost tool?
Scaling up your recipes.
Maybe the latest issue of Rachael Ray’s magazine has inspired you to try edamame-stuffed wasabi pork burgers on the your food truck or restaurant. But those recipes are only designed to serve 6… So how do you scale the recipe up to serve dozens or even hundreds of hungry customers for a catering event? This tool will give you the answer.
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How much should I charge?
How on earth do you figure out what to charge for your new dish? By completing each each field in this spreadsheet, you’ll be confident in knowing every ingredient used to create a dish is taken into account and will understand the profitability (or lack there of) for each menu item.
How to Use the Menu and Recipe Cost Template
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In our video walk-through below, we guide you through filling out this tool.
Original Recipe: Begin by entering the values from your original recipe, under the “original recipe” field. You’ll need to enter the total recipe yield (in ounces), as well as the number of servings the original recipe was intended to feed. To scale the recipe up or down, enter the desired number of servings in the field to the right. This will set your “scale factor” for the rest of the spreadsheet.
Ingredients Column: Here you will enter each ingredient needed to produce your recipe. Be as detailed as possible here and making sure to including even small costs like salt or pepper. By default this spreadsheet has space for a recipe with 27 total ingredients, but you can add additional rows into the spreadsheet if the recipe requires more.
Bulk Size Column: Next, begin entering your ingredients. The “Bulk Size” column is the total weight in ounces of the product, as you buy it from the wholesaler.
Bulk Cost: The “Bulk Cost” field is for what you pay for that ingredient, in your bulk sizes. This will generate a “Cost per Ounce.”
Recipe Amount Column: Next, enter the “Recipe Amount” for that ingredient. Again, this is the amount of each ingredient called for in your original, unscaled recipe.
The spreadsheet will scale up the amount you need for the desired amount of servings you’d like to end up with, and give you a total cost for that ingredient, in your new, larger-serving amounts. Keep adding ingredients, sizes, and prices until your recipe is complete.
Toward the bottom of the spreadsheet, you’ll find totals or calculations based on the information you entered:
Total Recipe Cost field tells you the total ingredient cost for your new, upscaled recipe.
Total Cost/Serving field tells you how much each serving will cost.
In red, we’ve included a Recommended Retail Price field, which simply multiplies your total cost per serving by 3, since your raw ingredient cost should be roughly 1/3 of your retail price.
Now, there’s one more cool feature that we want to draw your attention to, and that’s the “If actual servings obtained differ from desired “#” widget.
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Say you’ve followed your recipe to the letter, but for whatever reason, the number of portions you’ve ended up with is different than you’d planned; for example, you thought 10 pounds of fish would yield you 30 servings of your stuffed baked tilapia special, but for some reason, you’ve only ended up with 26.
Punch that number into the “number of servings obtained” field, and you’ll get a corrected cost per serving and recommended retail price, that more accurately reflects how many servings you actually got out of each recipe.
Sample Menu Cost Calculations: Video
In the video below, I walk you through this spreadsheet using an example from my own restaurant. I own a restaurant in Maine, so I decided to share my own food costs for our popular clam dip. Click the play to start the video tutorial.
Download the Menu and Recipe Cost Tool
That about covers it! Now, you’ll never spend precious minutes upscaling recipes and you’ll never have to worry if an elaborate special is wreaking havoc on food costs.
Menu and Food Costing Spreadsheet (.xlsx file)
Quick Reference Guide:
Enter the number of servings from your original recipe in cell D6, and your desired number of servings in cell F5. This will scale your recipe up and down.
Enter ingredient names in column A, along with size in ounces and price paid for ingredients. This will calculate cost per ounce in column D.
Enter the amount of each ingredient used in your recipe in column E. This will scale your ingredient amounts to match your desired servings, and calulate cost.
In row 40, your recommended retail price per serving is displayed. (This calculation is cost, multiplied by 3. Feel free to increase retail price further if product warrants a premium.)
If, after cooking, you end up with a different number of servings than you had planned, enter this number in cell I5 to perform corrected calculation.
Let us know if you have any questions about this tool in the comments field below. Once you’ve got your costs figured out using these formulas, download this food business canvas template to help you map your strategy for starting a profitable food business.
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Hey! ?I’m Brett Lindenberg, the founder of Food Truck Empire.
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