What is it? An AI-based food tracker
Who is it for? People looking to manage their weight
How much does it cost? Free with optional subscription
What makes it special? Fast and simple automatic meal recognition
Foodllama comes from the same team behind Waterllama, the charming hydration tracker that earned an Apple Design Award nomination a few years back. This time, the focus is on food: an AI-assisted app to help you keep track of what you eat each day.
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At setup, Foodllama asks a few questions about your health goals. In practice, though, the app is only really geared toward weight management – calories are the main metric on display, alongside a breakdown of protein/carbs/fat, and advice is tailored around hitting your weight goal.
As with any health app, habit building is key. Here, the aim is to make logging meals as effortless as possible, and Foodllama is pretty effective. Point your phone at your plate and it will attempt to recognize your meal, a neat trick that feels magical when it works. I found the accuracy to be fairly impressive, if perhaps a bit vague. Great if you just want a ballpark estimate, less so if you’re carefully tracking exact portion sizes or specific ingredients. In those cases you’ll still need to log food manually, or engage with the AI to correct mistakes.
You can also describe a meal by typing in plain English, which is often a more precise method than snapping a photo. But to my mind, a pretty notable omission is portion control. Whether you’ve had a towering bowl of pasta or just a few bites, the app won’t account for the difference. It doesn’t log the weight of ingredients, leaving it guessing how much of something you consumed.
As we’ve come to expect from the llama series of apps, the design is very easy on the eye – big, friendly, and colorful, with neat graphs, cutesy cartoons, and plenty of rounded corners. There are daily streaks to keep you motivated, charts that break down your intake, and a rotating series of bite-sized insights that offer quick tips for healthier eating. More advanced insights are promised in future updates, which should make the app feel more complete.
Compared with more established meal tracking apps, Foodllama is less exhaustive but more approachable. Those bigger platforms excel at precision, barcode scanning, and huge food databases, but they can feel overwhelming. Foodllama, by contrast, keeps things simple and playful, lowering the barrier to entry for people who want to track their eating habits without turning it into a second job.
If your goal is to roughly track your calories without much effort, or force yourself into the habit of thinking more critically about what you eat, this app is the way to go.