HealthyBiteAbout
Eating well shouldn't mean reading every label twice
HealthyBite helps people with food allergies and dietary needs find restaurants that may suit them — whether that's a peanut allergy, celiac disease, a vegan lifestyle, or keeping halal or kosher — and marks the dishes on the menu against what they avoid, so they know what to ask the staff about.
Why we built it
If you have a food allergy or a dietary requirement, you already know the routine: open a maps app, find somewhere that looks promising, dig through its website for a menu, scan the menu for things you can't eat, and then call ahead to check. Doing that for every meal — every time you travel, every time friends pick a new spot — is exhausting. People with the strictest needs end up eating at the same two or three places they trust, or just staying home.
We thought the discovery part of that problem could be a lot easier. HealthyBite starts from your diet and works outward: tell it what you avoid and what you prefer, and it surfaces nearby places, with each dish on their menus marked ✓ (nothing in the menu wording conflicts with what you avoid), ⚠ (the menu doesn't say — check), or ✕ (contains something you avoid).
How the app works
1. Build a dietary profile
Pick from 43 preferences across four groups — lifestyles (vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian and more), allergen and intolerance profiles (gluten-free, dairy-free, peanut-free and others), diet patterns (keto, paleo, low-carb), and religious requirements (halal, kosher, Jain). There's also a free-text field for severe allergies that triggers highlighted warnings throughout the app. Some preferences, such as low-sodium, low-FODMAP or organic, depend on amounts, preparation or sourcing that menus rarely state, so the app can't always judge them from a menu. If you don't make an account, your profile simply stays on your device.
2. Find restaurants near you
Share your location or type an address, choose a search radius, and HealthyBite pulls nearby restaurants from map data and the web. Each result shows the dietary tags it appears to fit, and you can open a place to see its menu marked dish by dish against your profile.
3. Read the menu that isn't online
Plenty of places have no menu on the web, or a PDF from four years ago. Point your camera at the printed menu on the table and HealthyBite reads it and marks the dishes the same way — same rules, same ✓ / ⚠ / ✕. Menu scanning is part of HealthyBite Plus.
4. Keep the places that worked
Save a restaurant to your SafeList and it's there next time, wherever you are. After a meal you can rate how well the staff knew their menu and how it went for you, and see how other diners answered.
Our approach to AI
HealthyBite uses AI to do the tedious part: reading menus from restaurants' websites and from photos you scan, and summarizing what diners say in reviews. Menus and summaries are made once and cached, so the same work isn't repeated for every visitor. The ✓ / ⚠ / ✕ marks themselves are worked out on your device by plain, transparent code, and your dietary profile is never sent to an AI. AI can be wrong, so AI summaries are labeled and every mark is an estimate. It should be a quiet helper in the background, not something you have to trust blindly with your health. How we use AI and your data.
Who's behind HealthyBite
HealthyBite is an independent project built and operated in the United States. It's small by design — there's no big company behind it, just a focus on doing one thing well: making it easier to find food you can actually eat. HealthyBite is for adults 18 and over. If you have feedback, a restaurant that's miscategorized, or an idea, we genuinely want to hear it. Get in touch.