Wondering what to make next with your ingredients? Snapchat's newest feature, a food ingredient scanner, allows users to open their Snapchat, point their camera at an ingredient, and tap and hold to scan and start looking for recipes involving the ingredient. They tweeted about the new feature after its release on Tuesday.
To use "Food Scan", all you have to do is line up your phone with a food item you are looking to cook with and hold your finger on the screen. This triggers the scan process and will give you recipe results that match the item you scanned. You can also click and hold the scan button on the bottom of the screen, below the circle photo button.
Once you've scanned, Snapchat will show you a variety of recipes. You might not have every ingredient for the recipes that the search results offer, but it could definitely help broaden your horizons or brainstorm new meals to make, using just one ingredient as a basis. It also helps users learn more about the food they are eating with fun food facts from Wikipedia. You can also learn more nutrition facts about the item using Snapchat's "Nutrition Scan." These tools could prove very helpful in figuring out what to cook for dinner.
I tried out Snapchat's food ingredient scanner and here's what I thought:
It was super easy to do because the process for scanning food is the same as using regular filters! The only difference was instead of pointing at my face, I was pointing at my ingredient of choice: a banana.
After scanning my ingredient, a small section of information about bananas popped up, followed by a selection of recipes including banana bread and banana pudding. I don't know if Snapchat could tell that my bananas are starting to brown, but I was actually planning to make banana bread with them, so it was helpful to be provided those recipes.
The feature provided a very quick and easy way for me to access multiple sources of information at once that would normally have taken multiple Google searches. I learned more about bananas (i.e., how bananas are botanically a fruit... what now?) and I found a couple of recipes I want to try to make with my browning bananas.
Overall, Snapchat's new food ingredient scanner is a good addition to the scans they already have included in the app for other items like products, songs, math problems, dog breeds, plants, cars, and more. It looks like the company is slowly on its way to helping users identify anything and everything in their everyday life.