HealthyBiteAbout
Eating well shouldn't mean reading every label twice
HealthyBite helps people find restaurants that actually fit their diet — whether that's a peanut allergy, celiac disease, a vegan lifestyle, or keeping halal or kosher — and reads every dish on the menu against what they avoid.
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 confirm. 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 "safe" places forever, 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 that match — with each dish on each menu flagged as a reasonable choice, something to double-check, or something to 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. 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 a menu with per-dish matches / check / avoid flags computed 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 every dish the same way — same rules, same ✓ / ⚠ / ✕, on paper it has never seen before. 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. You can also answer two questions after a meal — did the staff know their menu, and did you feel safe eating there — and see how other diners with restrictions like yours answered.
Our approach to AI
HealthyBite uses AI sparingly and deliberately. Menus, dish classifications, and place discovery are generated once and cached, so the same work isn't repeated for every visitor — and your dietary matching itself runs as plain, transparent code, not a per-user AI call. We think AI is a great way to organize messy, scattered information about restaurants, but it should be a quiet helper in the background, not something you have to trust blindly with your health.
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. If you have feedback, a restaurant that's miscategorized, or an idea, we genuinely want to hear it. Get in touch.