Show HN: Get nutrition labels for any recipe (YouTube, Website, Text, Image)

3 d3r1ck 3 6/15/2025, 6:53:09 PM
Heya HN,

I love watching cooking videos on YouTube, and one day an idea sparked: Can I instantly get the nutritional values for this recipe?

The problem: Great recipes are everywhere, but figuring out the actual nutrition is a chore.

Most of us who track calories or macros have to:

* Manually get nutritional info for every ingredient.

* Wrestle with spreadsheets for calculation.

* Or just give up and eat that lasagna.

Let’s be real: no one enjoys that, especially when you just want to cook and eat your food.

So I built Recp.ai. It’s a free tool that pulls the nutrition data for you. Just give it a YouTube link, a recipe from a website, a photo of a cookbook page, or even just pasted text. It identifies the ingredients and quantities, matches them against the USDA database, and gives you a full nutrition label.

It started as a script to pull ingredients from YouTube transcripts using Gemini. Then I got obsessed. Why not any website? So I added a scraper. What about any list of ingredients? Added text parsing. How about a cookbook? Now it uses Google Cloud Vision so you can just upload or snap a photo of the recipe.

I wanted to build something lightweight, fast, and simple that you'd actually use. No sign-ups. No ads. Privacy-first.

What I’m happy with? It works on a huge variety of sources. I fed it a photo of my old Escoffier cookbook recipe and voila - it works.

What's next? I'm planning to use Google Cloud Vision to identify the dish, say "Beef Pho", it'd figure out its typical ingredients, and generate an estimated nutrition label. It would then ask users to confirm the dish, so the result is as accurate as possible. Any suggestions here if this would be the right way?

Would love to hear your thoughts, and if this feels like something that would with your meal prep. Just sharing something I built because I wanted it to exist and solve a problem.

Comments (3)

rockysharma · 13h ago
very interesting,

- Where are you fetching nutritional data for the given food elements?

- How much trustworthy is your source?

- How much accurate is the final nutritional value?

d3r1ck · 13h ago
Hi,

* As usercvapp mentioned, I'm fetching nutrition data from USDA (https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/).

* I would say yes, USDA is the gold standard for food and nutrition data.

* Each ingredient is matched with foundational and legacy foods (not pre-packaged or branded) so if the matching is right the values are accurate.

* Final nutrition label relies on specific quantity and unit of each ingredient extracted, which you can edit to ensure the best estimation accuracy.

usercvapp · 13h ago