Finding foods

[satcomjimmy]

Is there a trick to finding foods? For example, I went to chick-fil-a today and there are multiple entries for chick-fil-a sauce but most of the other items offered by chick-fil-a are not in the food list at all.

[Charlie284]

There is not a hidden restaurant-search mode. The result you saw is consistent with the databases the app was using.

When this question was posted, v1.5.0 had three tabs: Products, Food, and Recently added (source). Products searched Open Food Facts, while Food searched a curated USDA subset. That hosted subset contained Foundation Foods and SR Legacy, not the much larger Branded Foods dataset (v1.5 database documentation).

That is why several Chick-fil-A sauces can appear while most restaurant menu items do not: packaged sauces can be contributed to Open Food Facts from their labels/barcodes, but Open Food Facts is a community product-label database, not a complete restaurant-menu catalogue.

For the current app, I would try this:

1. Update to the current release (v2.0.2 at the time of writing).
2. Open Settings → Food databases and make sure FoodData Central (Branded Foods) is enabled. The current app exposes that source alongside Foundation, SR Legacy, Survey, and BLS (source).
3. In Add Meal, leave the source on All, then search the exact menu-item name, for example spicy deluxe sandwich, rather than only chick-fil-a. Current All searches the Products and Food sources together (source). The Food backend currently full-text-searches the food's name, not its separate brands field (source), so a restaurant-name-only query can miss a record whose item name does not include the brand.

Even with FDC Branded enabled, neither source guarantees every current restaurant item. If an item is absent, tap the + button and save it as a custom meal using the restaurant's official Nutrition & Allergens page. Saved custom meals are included in later searches ahead of remote results (source). If you only need calories for a one-off entry, Quick add is the shorter route.

[satcomjimmy]

Would I have to side-load 2.0.2? the google play store only has 1.5