Food calorie calculator: count calories from a meal description or a photo

Text: the description is split into items at commas, “and”, semicolons and new lines. Each item is read for a quantity (digits, fractions like 1/2 or ½, ranges like 2-3, and words such as a, half, one and a half, a dozen), a unit (g, kg, oz, lb, ml, l, cup, tbsp, tsp, slice, piece, serving, can, clove, strip, small, medium, large) and the food name. “Toast with butter” becomes toast plus a pat of butter; “chicken breast with skin” stays one food because USDA has a food with that name. The food name is matched against about 620 everyday foods with short names and search words first, then the whole USDA list, allowing a typo or two; the closest alternatives go into the row’s drop-down list.

Amounts use USDA’s own portion weights: “2 eggs” is two large eggs (2 × 50 g), “a cup of orange juice” is 248 g, “a slice of toast” is one slice of white bread (29 g). A food with no count (“rice”, “milk”) gets one cup or one serving; a spread or sauce without an amount gets a spoonful. Bowl, plate and handful have no USDA weight, so the tool assumes 1 cup, 1 serving and 1 oz and marks the row as estimated. Nothing is guessed silently: every row shows its grams, and you can change them.

Photo: the image is cropped to a square and passed to CLIP ViT-B/32, an image-and-text model released by OpenAI under the MIT licence, running on your device with ONNX Runtime Web. The model compares the photo with descriptions of about 260 common foods and dishes (“a photo of hummus, a type of food”) and ranks them. Each guess is linked to a USDA food, so the numbers you add are the same USDA values as in text mode.

The text box also reads meals written in Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Iraqi and Maghrebi dialects), Arabizi such as “nos taba2 foul”, and Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Hindi and Urdu (Devanagari, Urdu script or Latin letters), Indonesian/Malay and Russian. The language is picked from the script and from the words each language’s word list knows, and the row shows the food’s name in that language above the USDA name. English text goes through the same English parser as before.

Each language has a hand-written word list for numbers and fractions, containers and spoons, and the most common foods, linked to the same USDA foods: «نص طبق مربى» (half a plate of jam) is USDA “Jams and preserves”, half a plate. Plates, bowls, small cups, handfuls and sandwiches keep the estimated-weight rules above and are marked estimated. Dishes that USDA does not describe, such as koshari, mulukhiyah, mandi, paella or biryani, are listed as not in the database with buttons for their main ingredients rather than given invented numbers. On phrasings written after the word lists were finished, 52 of 58 meals (90%) were read completely right; the rest need a row fixed by hand.

Few people weigh their food, so the text box also reads everyday amounts in every supported language: “a pinch of salt”, “a bit of rice”, “a heaped tablespoon of sugar”, “a cup and a bit of milk”, «ربع وشوية رز» (a quarter and a bit of rice), «معلقتين سكر», «لقمتين عيش», “un chorrito de aceite” or “ek chutki namak”. Each expression means either a share of the food’s usual USDA serving or an assumed volume or weight. The row shows the words you wrote with a ≈ note that states the assumption, is marked estimated, and you can change the amount or the grams.

Where a convention exists it is used: a pinch is 1/16 teaspoon (0.31 ml, about 0.4 g of salt), a dash ⅛ teaspoon, a metric drop 0.05 ml, and teaspoons, tablespoons and cups are the US measures USDA weighs its portions with. Where the meaning is fuzzy by nature (a bit, a bite, a splash, a knob of butter) there is no standard, so the table gives the middle value chosen. Arithmetic words work too: “and a bit” adds a quarter of the amount before it (at least 1/12), so a quarter and a bit is ⅓; “minus a bit” takes off 10%; “more than” and “less than” multiply by 1.2 and 0.8, “almost” by 0.9; “about” keeps the number and marks it estimated. A small, large or jumbo cup, bowl or plate counts as 0.75, 1.5 or 2 of the usual one, and a heaped spoon as 1.5 level spoons.

The word lists hold 780 everyday expressions across the eleven languages; the table shows up to four spellings per language. Grams depend on the food: a splash of milk is about 5 g but a splash of oil 4.6 g, because the calculator converts volumes with each food’s own USDA density.

Sources: Cooking weights and measures (dash, pinch, smidgen) (checked 2026-09-23); Drop (unit): the metric drop of 0.05 ml (checked 2026-09-23)

Values from USDA SR28 (SR Legacy), using USDA’s measured portion weights, worked out when this page was built. Protein, carbohydrate, fat and fibre are in grams; “–” means USDA has no fibre analysis for that food.

• It recognises one main food per photo from a fixed list of about 260 common foods and dishes, including Middle-Eastern staples such as hummus, falafel, pita, tahini, fava beans and dates. Dishes outside the list get the nearest label, which may be wrong.
• Mixed plates, sauces, drinks in opaque cups, unusual angles and poor light make guesses worse. The match score says how much better one label fits than the others; it is not the probability that the guess is right.
• It cannot measure portions. A photo has no scale, and the same plate can hold 100 g or 400 g of rice, so you choose the portion from USDA’s servings or type the grams.
• The photo stays on your device. The model runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded, stored or shared.
• Not every dish has a USDA value. SR28 has hummus, falafel, pita, tahini, naan, chapati, bulgur and couscous, but not dishes such as biryani, shawarma or tabbouleh; describe their ingredients instead.

Nutrition data: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 28 (SR28), SR28, September 2015, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Nutrient Data Laboratory; distributed in FoodData Central as FoodData Central “SR Legacy” (April 2018). Public domain (U.S. Government work, 17 U.S.C. 105); FoodData Central data are published under CC0 1.0. The page uses 8,257 foods (every SR28 food except baby foods and the American Indian/Alaska Native group), with values per 100 g and USDA’s portion weights copied unchanged.

Photo model: CLIP ViT-B/32 by OpenAI (MIT licence), image part only, stored with 8-bit weights and run on your device. OpenAI has not published its training data; its model card describes crawled image–caption pairs and says the model was built for research and should be tested for each use, which is why this tool only offers suggestions from a fixed food list and leaves the choice to you.

Sources: USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy) (checked 2026-09-23); OpenAI CLIP (model and model card) (checked 2026-09-23)

This calculator gives estimates for everyday tracking. Real foods vary with variety, recipe, brand and cooking, and portions are easy to misjudge. If you manage diabetes, kidney disease, allergies, an eating disorder or another medical condition, follow the advice of your doctor or a registered dietitian and use the nutrition label of packaged foods.

1. Open Describe a meal and type what you ate, separating foods with commas, “and” or new lines. Amounts can be numbers, fractions or words (2, 1/2, ½, a, half, a couple), with units such as g, oz, cup, tbsp, slice, piece, can or large.
2. Press Calculate calories. Every recognised food appears in the meal table; anything the tool does not recognise is listed with “did you mean” suggestions.
3. Check each row. If the food is not quite right (fried instead of boiled, whole instead of skim), pick another one from the row’s list; change the amount, the serving or the grams if your portion was different.
4. For a photo, open From a photo, choose a picture of one dish and press Recognise food. The first time, the model (about 104 MB) downloads once and stays in your browser. Tick the right food, set the portion, and add it to the meal.
5. Read the total at the bottom of the table. For a daily target to compare it with, use the calorie calculator.