With so many people taking pictures of their meals, why not put that to good use and make those pics part of a pathway to healthier living? That’s the gist behind Feast, a new iOS app that officially launched today.
Feast is basically a photo diary for everything you consume, from full breakfasts to cans of Diet Coke. Unlike other food logging apps out there, Feast is not interested in having you count calories or macronutrients or providing you with any real data about what you consume. “I think the general public are not into macronutrient breakdown,” Brad Kim, Feast Co-Founder and CEO told me by phone earlier this month, “It flusters and confuses them.”
Instead, Feast meant to be an easy way to simply snap a photo of everything you eat, so you can get a broader understanding of what you consume on a daily basis. You can also take a selfie to help illustrate your state of mind when you at. “Feast puts a mirror on yourself, so that you can self-reflect and become self-aware and self-correct,” Feast Co-Founder and CEO, Jackie Kim said during that same call.
Feast does offer weight tracking and even has it’s own homegrown AI assistant, dubbed “Sid,” that uses machine learning to help automatically identify and log food you’re taking pictures.
In a way Feast trying to be like an Instagram for eating (though one could argue Instagram is the Instagram for eating). You can edit your photos, make them public, and follow other individual feeds.
Feast isn’t the only visual food journal app out there. Both Foodvisor and Bite.ai offer food photojournaling, but both of those apps use AI to surface nutritional information about what you’re eating. And with YesHealth, users can share photos of their meals with nutritionists and get access to personlized coaching to reach weight goals.
Connecting its users with dieticians and nutritionists is on Feast’s product roadmap. The app is free to use right now, but during our call Brad Kim told me that potential ways for the company (which is bootstrapped) to make money include licensing it out to medical professionals who want to monitor what their clients eat, creating an online marketplace where Feast users could hire nutritionists, and, of course advertising.
Feast is built on an interesting premise — that when it comes to healthier eating, more data about what we consume can lead to less success. And on some level, this makes sense. Just looking back and seeing that I grabbed a handful of Wheat Thins eight times in one day is probably just as useful as knowing numerically how bad Wheat Thins are for me. Now that Feast is live on iOS (Android app to follow later this year), we’ll see if this less is more can get more people to eat less.
