HealthifyMe, an Indian health and wellness startup, has unveiled a new AI-powered feature designed to identify Indian dishes from images for more efficient calorie tracking. This feature, known as “Snap,” addresses the complexity of tracking Indian cuisine due to its wide variety and the common practice of eating from a Thaali plate containing multiple food items and portion sizes.
With Snap, users can take pictures of their meals, allowing the app to recognize and log the food items captured in the images. Alternatively, users can grant access to their photo galleries, enabling automatic scanning of food images. Users can later review these pictures and the food items within them, allowing them to take pictures first and manage calorie logging at a later time.
To address privacy concerns, HealthifyMe explains that the model detects food images on the user’s device and sends them to servers for specific dish recognition. The gallery-based model is preferred because it provides more time for recognizing food items compared to taking pictures for immediate recognition.
If multiple items are detected in an image, Snap prompts users to tap on each item and add it to their calorie tracking. Users are presented with an adjustable rectangular box to focus on different items within the image.
HealthifyMe’s Co-founder & CEO, Tushar Vashisht, stated that the company initially started as a food-tracking app and aims to enhance user engagement and retention with the Snap feature, reducing the need for manual data entry.
HealthifyMe acknowledges that it has explored image-based food recognition in the past but cites the availability of improved generative AI models as a key factor in making Snap possible. Currently, the feature is trained to recognize 150,000 Indian food items, boasting a 60–70% accuracy rate. Even if the model doesn’t recognize a food item accurately, users receive suggestions, and human reviewers correct false recognitions. Users can also manually tag misidentified photos to improve the model, with plans to increase accuracy to over 80% in the near future.
HealthifyMe faces competition in the AI-powered food recognition space, with companies like Samsung Food and Snapcalorie working on similar solutions.
In the coming weeks, HealthifyMe plans to expand its food logging options, allowing users to send images to HealthifyMe’s WhatsApp or tag them on X with food images. The company is also working on a voice input feature and enhancing its existing AI-powered assistant, Ria.
HealthifyMe offers various subscription plans, starting at $4.80 (₹399) per month, with features like an AI-powered fitness and nutrition assistant, meal planning, and healthy recipes. Pro plans, starting from $48 per month (₹4,000), offer additional benefits such as an AI-based meal planner, nutrition and fitness coaches, and a smart scale. Higher-tier Pro plans include doctor consultations, metabolic panel tests, and continuous glucose monitoring devices. Over 200,000 users subscribe to HealthifyMe, with nearly 40% choosing the Pro plan.
In 2020, HealthifyMe partnered with Swiggy to curate healthy meals and restaurants and is exploring collaborations with food and grocery services to leverage its technology.
