Show HN: Newtrien – nutrition facts labels for recipe blogs
newtrien.com
newtrien.com
While developing the website was time-consuming (especially since I'm doing it solo - programming, "design", etc.), I feel the hard part has only just begun, because I have zero experience on how to promote a service. But it doesn't matter, because even just launching the service was a great personal success for me, since I have a huge history of starting personal projects and not actually finishing them (who doesn't, right?).
So anyway, newtrien.com is a website where people who own recipe blogs or websites can easily create nutrition facts labels for their recipes, and them embed those labels on their site. It currently has a database of about 800.000 nutritional facts for over 10.000 ingredients, but I plan to import more nutritional databases in the short future, as well as build a feature where users can add their own custom ingredients, on the off chance that some exotic new ingredient is missing from the database.
I am looking for feedback on pretty much everything: business idea, website usability, design, etc. Thanks!
A few comments/suggestions:
The FDA's idea of carbohydrate as a 'dietary fiber' is decidedly odd; would it be possible to generate labels for other regulatory bodies (eg. for countries in the EU)?
When creating a physical label, displaying the dimensions would be very useful.
Instead of having to enter each ingredient with corresponding quantities, it would be much more convenient for the end user to simply feed in a complete recipe. It's not much fun parsing plain text, but perhaps you could accept various formats such as CookML, RecipeBook XML, REML, hrecipe, JSON...
yummly (http://www.yummly.com/) might also be interested in what you've created...
would it be possible to generate labels for other regulatory bodies (eg. for countries in the EU)?
Hmm, it appears I have to make this feature a little clearer, because I have already implemented two of the most common EU labels, the GDA pills (http://i.imgur.com/ZROSP6l.png) and the tabular format (http://i.imgur.com/O5OnepQ.png). The EU labels even take into account the fact that the daily recommended intake values are different in the EU than the US.
When creating a physical label, displaying the dimensions would be very useful.
Good point, people who package food will definitely be interested in the physical dimensions of the label, even though the exported PDFs are scalable.
It's not much fun parsing plain text, but perhaps you could accept various formats such as CookML, RecipeBook XML, REML, hrecipe
I had no idea these formats existed until now, to be honest. I will surely look into them.
yummly might also be interested in what you've created...
They already have nutritional information on each recipe page: http://i.imgur.com/ZlIGUqi.png. There are quite a few large websites that already provide nutrition labels, that's one of the reasons I came to this idea, I thought that small food bloggers would be interested in having them too.
Thanks again!
No, my mistake. The options were quite clear, I just wasn't paying attention. However, you could modify the text on the front page: "Label your products with FDA-compliant nutrition facts" to mention the other options.
Also, I just noticed the magnifying glass effect on the front page. It's a great way to combine a preview with an actual screenshot - very neat!