Hey 1200Aus!
Like the title says, I was getting fed up with MFP, Cronometer, and the other big calorie trackers which were filled with American junk, low quality jank entries, typos, foods with incorrect nutritional info, and just the sheer number of misses for Aussie food products.
So, like any good neurospicy person with a hyperfixation would do, I spent the last few months painstakingly cataloguing every single Aussie food I could get my hands on. The result is...
MacrAU, for iPhone and Android. I believe it's the most comprehensive database of Australian foods on either app store. It contains the foods we actually eat. And it's completely free during early access.
Sharing it here because I spend a lot of time getting low-cal and high-protein meal suggestions from this sub, and I feel like a few people here might find it useful.
The tl;dr:
MacrAU contains over 88,000 unique Aussie foods, including Woolies/Coles, Aldi, the full menus of 50+ Aussie fast foods chains, and tonnes of other smaller manufacturers, retailers and suppliers. All with full nutritional info.
The slightly longer version:
There are a bunch of features, and I'm probably forgetting some, but it's all pretty straightforward. Just stuff that helps you use MacrAU's massive database in the easiest way:
- Barcode scanning, unlimited.
- If you find a barcode that isn't listed, you can snap a photo of the front label and the nutritional info panel, and it adds it to the database - not just for you, but for every user (after it gets reviewed by a human).
- There's a recipe importer, which lets you paste a recipe url or take a photo of your favourite cookbook. It'll read the ingredients and match them to the foods in our database, so you can get an exact breakdown of what you're eating which is more accurate than the nutritional info that they publish on the recipe websites.
- There are adaptive calorie targets which automatically adjust based on your weight and the calories you've consumed over the past few weeks.
- Goals, targets, progress, integration with apple/google health apps to import the calories you've burned, all the stuff you'd expect from a macro tracker.
What I'd love from you:
Use the app, report the bugs, snap labels of any missing foods, help me make the app better.
If you're an iPhone user, and this sounds interesting, I'd love your feedback. The app is live on the app store at the link below:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macrau/id6760379424
If you're an Android user, well, I'd really love your help. It's in beta testing on Google Play, and we need as many beta testers as possible. You can get it on your phone by following the steps below:
Step 1: join this Google Group with the email you use for Google Play -- https://groups.google.com/g/macrau-testers/
Step 2: click "become a tester" on this page -- https://play.google.com/apps/testing/app.macrau.app
Step 3: download the app here -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.macrau.app
(There can be a bit of a delay between steps, as Google can be a bit buggy and delayed with registering a tester. So if step 2 or 3 doesn't work at first, give it an hour or so and try again.)
Please let me know if there are any features you'd like to see added, and I'll implement them as quickly as I can. If we're missing your favourite fast food chain, or you want a different way to log foods, or you want a new colour scheme... anything that would improve your experience, just get in touch.
Massive Disclaimer:
There will almost certainly be bugs. I'd love it if you could take the time to report them. I will fix them.
What it costs:
Right now, it's completely free. It's in early access and I wanna iron out any bugs and data inconsistencies before I start charging anyone.
Eventually, the cost will be $0.99 per month. That will include unlimited barcode scanning, photo importing/analysis, everything. There will be a free tier, too.
But anyone from r/1200Australia who downloads during the early access period, I'll give you a free 6 months when we do finally flip the switch to paid. Which won't be for a while, anyway. I'll apply it automatically, but if I miss you, just DM me.
Thank you!
Thanks so much for reading, and if you're interested in trying MacrAU, I'd love your feedback on how I can improve the app. If you give it a try, I'm confident you'll get hits for the barcodes of most things in your pantry. And if it misses, I'd love to know.
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The process, for those who are interested:
I thought this would be a pretty simple project going into it, since a lot of the nutritional info for Aussie foods is publicly posted online.
Turns out, that was wildly optimistic. Woolies and Coles \do* indeed publish a lot of NIP for their foods, but it's absolutely riddled with errors. Chicken breasts which claim they have 150g of protein per 100g serve. Greek yoghurts which have more grams of sugar than grams of carbs. Wholemeal bread that has 1200 calories per slice.*
And don't get me started on the fast food chains. Good lord.
So this ended up turning into a journey of actually going out and photographing thousands of nutrition panels to correct the thousands of errors they publish online.
Anyhow, after months of running around to find the correct nutritional info from all sorts of different sources, I'm at a point now we're I'm confident that our database is mostly error free and accurate to what the manufacturer prints on the label.
(I say "mostly" because I'm just one guy doing this in my spare time, and I'm not intimately across 88,000 different foods. But if you find something that looks funky, you can report it in the app and I'll fix it ASAP.)
EDIT: thanks so much to our bug finders! I've just published an update to patch some visual bugs and glitches you guys found, as well as a glitch in the carbohydrate targets. To get the update, just leave MacrAU open for about thirty seconds, and the update should download in the background. Then quit the app and reopen it, and everything should work as intended...
...until we find the next bug. Which no doubt exists. But we'll get them all.