Scan food with Snapchat to discover new recipes worth trying

Have you ever eaten great food at a local restaurant and wondered how to cook it yourself? Or maybe you don’t know what to cook for dinner based on random items in the kitchen? Now you can find solutions to these food problems with the magic of Snapchat’s computer vision.

Update Snapchat

As with most new features, it’s a good idea to install the latest version of Snapchat. So, go to the respective app repository to check for updates and install them if there are any. If not, open the app.

• Install Snapchat: Android (Free) | iOS (free)

Food scanning

When you open Snapchat, it will launch in your camera by default, so you should be exactly where you need to be.

Find the food you want to analyze and point your camera at it. Press the yellow scan button to start the identification process. In addition, you can press and hold anywhere in the camera’s field of view to start scanning.

View Results

After a few seconds, an information bar will appear at the bottom of the screen. First, you will see a result on Wikipedia based on the identified food. You will then find a scrollable horizontal list of Allrecipes matching your result; click on the desired dish to open the recipe.

According to Snapchat, Food Scan can identify over 1,200 ingredients and recommend over 4,500 recipes. Based on my limited testing, the function can also detect ready meals, like pizza. However, it can’t scan multiple ingredients at the same time to help you figure out what to do with those specific ingredients – at least not yet.

You can also use the scan feature to identify consumer products, wine, dogs, plants, and songs. Scan can also recommend lenses based on what it sees.