Add missing food to the database – US & Canada

The US & Canada have agreed on a standard labelling system making adding products to the Perfect Diet Tracker easy! If your user is located in the US or Canada the software will automatically show you the screen below.

To add a food product from another country using the international data entry screen click here.


Select the add new product link

Add a new product link

Start by selecting the ‘Add new product’ link to open your regional add product window. The ‘Add food’ window will also start automatically if the search has been unable to find any matches for a product


Enter the product information

US & Canada food nutrition label

Brand (1)

Enter the brand name. The Perfect Diet Tracker will automatically suggest brand names, or you can add a new name.

Product description (2)

Enter a description of the product. The brand will automatically be added to the end of the description later so you do not need to enter the brand again into the description.

We recommend you enter the description in the same format as the foods already in the database to keep things consistent and easy to find in the alphabetical search listings. This format is the food product type first, then a comma, then the details, for example ‘Soup, Tomato, Packet’.

Serving size (3)

Enter the product serving size from the nutrition label.

If you are entering details for a ‘per item’ product and do not know the weight (for example 1 burger = 400 calories) you would enter ‘1 burger’ in the first box, ‘400’ in the second box, and then check the calories tickbox.

Typical values (4)

Simply complete the nutritional information from the label.

Add the product (5)

Finally, to add the product to the database click the ‘Add product’ button.

The software will do a quick check to ensure the data is valid using a series of mathematical computations on the data, and then add the product to the database.

21 thoughts on “Add missing food to the database – US & Canada”

  1. hello

    Do you edit Perfect Diet in french?

    Salutations
    ChJ

  2. I’m afraid the Perfect Diet Tracker has not been translated to French yet. It is something we are looking at, however there is no current schedule for a French conversion, sorry!

  3. Hi,

    Does Perfect Diet Tracker use any food databases relevent for New Zealand or Australia?

  4. Yes, the software also has databases for both Australia and New Zealand, you will find if you try to add a product while either of these countries are selected as the users country the input form will be slightly different to the US form as the product data is in a different order.

  5. Does it include a database for India or is there a work round

  6. If you select ‘India’ for the users country, the software will automatically use both the international database, and add entries that are specific to India.

    At the moment our food database for India is still small, but it is growing quite quickly and will automatically be updated in the software as new products are added.

  7. Many countries import food from the USA, or have adopted the USA nutrition labels. It might be nice to have this as an option in the ‘Preferences’ panel rather than based on the users country.

  8. It is true that a lot of manufacturers in other countries seem to use the US & Canada nutritional labels on their products, however there are often small differences, for example some countries track items in kilojoules and the US label does not cater for this, and sodium is often reported in different units.

    We will add your suggestion to the development list, i.e. add an option in the preferences panel so users can override the suggested entry form as this is a great idea (thanks!), but ideally we would prefer the software to automatically suggest the best form as many users do not venture into the preferences panels, and in an ideal world they should never have to, so if any users know of specific countries that seem to have moved to the US / Canada nutritional label please let us know and we will look into these and update the software accordingly.

  9. An option has been added to the ‘display’ tab of the user settings window to allow users to override the default food entry form and choose between the various input forms available. The ‘Automatic’ option is selected as default, using this option the software will continue to display the current suggested form for the users country.

  10. If i Add foods to Diet tracker..eg recipes i use constantly when i do a backup is this part of the data base included so that when i go to another machine i do nto have to re-enter the information?

    As we travel a lot I often use my protbale or theh usbands when nto at home and would not like to h ave to keep adding the nutrition data

  11. When you backup your files using the option in the file menu, this will backup all your data and products you have added so you can restore this on another computer.

  12. Is it possible to add new products I had stored in another diet Tracker. The data is a CSV file and It can save in excel but the software will not allow me to import.

  13. Yes, if you want to import food you have added on another computer you can use the ‘import food’ option in the file menu to do this.

    On the original computer locate the file ‘userfood.db’, this could be in a number of locations depending on the platform you are using, on Windows it is usually in c:/program files/perfect diet tracker/data/ while on a mac system use the spotlight in the top right corner of the screen to locate the file.

    One you have this file, copy it to the other computer and use the import food option to add it.

    If all the users are the same another option is to simply use backup and restore to copy all the user data across and not just the food, or to setup dropbox to keep both computers in sync.

  14. Hi, I want to sugest the translation in french, I see in the coments that you don’t have this version. Also an spanish version will be usefull because I’m using products from Mx, USA and Canada.

  15. It would be nice if the update results screen opened to the side of the main screen instead of on top of it,obscuring the data to be entered. I do like your program! Will it be available for the ipad?

  16. Thanks for the suggestion Lynn, we will see what we can do. Yes, an iPad version is in the pipeline and should be available quite soon.

  17. Hi,
    I was wondering if there was such a thing, as with weight watchers, that you can have a recipe builder? You add in all the products in a recipe you have, and the search engine finds the values for the items you put in the recipe, then stores it in favorites. This is helpful when you have a recipe book that does not give you all the food values (as many do now).?

  18. Yes, we recommend the ‘groups’ feature for recipes.

    You can create a group by clicking on the create button just below the diary. If you have items in the diary already selected the app will use these for the new group, or if you have nothing selected it will create a new group. Either way you can then add and remove items from the group.

    Once you have created your recipe or group you can then insert it into your diary using the insert button. Groups are stored so if you add the same recipe on another day you do not have to enter all the ingredients again, and you can also enter fractions for the serving size, so for example if you entered a recipe for a pie , you can insert 1/8 for an eighth of the pie and the app will calculate all the ratios of the ingredients for you when it inserts into the diary.

  19. Have you any plans to allow addition of new items by scancode?

  20. As an avid cook, I have used software to store my recipes and to calculate nutritional values for almost 20 years. (I use “Now You’re Cooking,” but there are many others on the market … http://cookbook-recipe-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ includes a list.)

    I have tracked my diet for years as well, by exporting the key values for each recipe (calories, protein, etc.) into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

    For me to manually re-enter the ingredients in hundreds of recipes using the “Group” function in Perfect Diet Tracker simply isn’t practical. It would take weeks of hard work.

    Is there any way to import these items from an Excel spreadsheet as (for example): Sauce, Spaghetti … etc.?

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