Foods

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A food is anything Tuna can track: something you buy, something you cook, or the plain ingredient underneath both. Every food belongs to one of three kinds, and the connections between them are what make the rest of the app work.

The three kinds

Generic foods are the plain version of a thing: milk, not a brand of milk. Tuna ships with a catalog of them, organized so that related foods know about each other. A generic food stands for itself.

Searching chicken: what's in the pantry first, then generic foods from the catalog

Products are branded items, usually with a barcode. When you scan a jar of Kroger marinara, the product carries the label details: brand, barcode, serving size, nutrition from the label.

Recipes are foods too. The dish a recipe makes has its own nutrition, cost, and servings, rebuilt from the actual ingredients you cooked with.

Products and recipes can be linked to the generic food they really are. "Kroger 2% Milk" links to milk. That link is the quiet workhorse of the whole app: it is how Tuna knows a recipe calling for milk can use the jug in your fridge, how expiration defaults get picked, and how Use It Up finds the recipes that use what needs eating.

Tuna links products automatically when it is confident, suggests a match when it is close, and leaves it to you when it is not sure. Your call is final: a link you confirm or dismiss is never overridden by automation. Not every product needs a link, and that is fine.

Your own foods

When Tuna has never seen the thing you ate, it becomes one of your custom foods. They arise three ways:

  • You describe a meal and the estimate is saved as a food.
  • You create one by hand, label details and all.
  • You resolve an unknown barcode, which mints a product only your household sees.

Custom foods are searchable next time and visible to your whole household. Describe a restaurant meal once and it is a one-tap log next week.

Where nutrition comes from

Every food knows where its numbers came from:

  • From the label: scanned or typed off the package.
  • From the catalog: carried in with the barcode match.
  • Estimated: produced from a description, and labeled with a confidence level (High, Medium, or Low).

The source travels with the food, so a guessed burrito never quietly blends into your real numbers.

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Pantry Items