If you’ve ever tried to closely monitor the calories and nutrients of what you’re eating, you know it requires a lot of work. Once you’re done reading labels, estimating portion sizes (often incorrectly), weighing ingredients, and then adding things together, you may need an extra helping to replenish all the energy you’ve expended.
And sure, there are meal-logging apps like MyFitnessPal, but often you still have to use best guesses as to portion sizes and manually enter lots of data.
The creators behind Versaware want to make the whole process less messy and more precise with a smart kitchen system that can estimate the total calorie and macronutrient makeup of a meal as you make it.
How does it work? The system centers around two connected kitchen products – a bowl and a scale – and the Versaware app. As a user makes their meal, they scan the ingredient barcode (for packaged food) or query for the item (for fresh produce), then drop it in the bowl or onto the scale. The app takes the weight of the added ingredient and calculates the incremental calorie count and macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) as you build your meal.
Company cofounders Jacob Lindberg and Creed McKinnon decided to build their smart kitchen nutrition system after finding existing solutions to monitor calorie and nutrient intake disjointed and cumbersome to use.
“We said, ‘why don’t we consolidate all of this data collection and these tools needed to understand what you’re eating and bring them into one device?'” Lindberg said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And we realized that if you tethered the data corresponding to an ingredient’s weight straight to the phone, and just prompted the mobile application for the query of what that ingredient was, then you would solve the entire solution around building a meal from the ground up.”
According to Lindberg, showing the calories and nutrients in a meal in real-time allows the user to easily adjust as they build a meal.
“You can alter the portions of each ingredient that goes into your meal by visually seeing the macronutrient composition of that entire meal,” said Lindberg. “You can, for example, add more flour or reduce the amount of sugar based on however many calories, grams of fat, or grams of protein you want to ingest.”
The current product prototype can scan barcodes and has access to a database with 10s of thousands of products via an open API. Lindberg says they will continue to add features over time, including computer vision capabilities that will scan a food item and estimate its nutritional makeup.
Last week the company started taking preorders on its website and had already sold over $50 thousand in presales. To help gear up for manufacturing, the company’s founders have been working closely with the Centropolis accelerator and plan to start raising seed capital in March. The company plans to start shipping to early backers by the fall of this year.
While many early smart scale products have had mixed success, Versaware hopes to set itself apart by focusing the system and app on a health and fitness use-case. We’ll be watching to see if this will help the company succeed where others haven’t.
If you’d like to pre-order a Versaware bowl and cutting board, you can do so here.
You can watch the Versaware intro video below.