Calorie counting made easier with this pretty lunch box
But you'll still have to do the cooking.
Today's technology can do fitness tracking without much manual input, but that's not the case with food tracking. There's simply no "smart fork" just yet that can measure your nutritional intake, and the best solutions right now require you to follow a food plan or log the information yourself, neither of which is ideal without some way of properly quantifying the food you're eating. With that in mind, a startup has come up with the Prepd Pack, which is a good-looking modular lunch box that comes with professional recipes tied to iOS' HealthKit. In other words, simply fill up the box with one of these recipes and your iPhone will know how much nutrition you're gobbling up; and if you like, you'll also get the added convenience of preparing lunches for multiple days in one go.
The Prepd Pack itself consists of a case with a stylish wooden cover that doubles as an eating mat, and this houses modular containers of different sizes to allow multiple configurations, along with magnetic silverware that can be tucked into the middle of the mat. The leakproof, BPA-free Tritan containers are stackable, which makes it easier for preparing multiple "Instagram-worthy" lunches in advance, courtesy of recipes curated by chefs, dietitians and nutritionists.
As for the software, the nicely designed Prepd app lets you search recipes by a specific diet type, health goal or key ingredient. Naturally, each recipe contains all the nutritional values that get fed to iOS' HealthKit. According to the startup, it's still exploring some ideas on how to let the app know that you're having lunch -- likely by way of machine learning and smartwatch integration, so that over time it'll learn when and where the user tends to have lunch, in order to provide a seamless experience. The app will also be available on Android, but there's no word on whether it'll get Google Fit integration for nutrition tracking. This will likely depend on how well the product does over time.
The Prepd Pack is the work of a two-man team: Chris Place is formerly of Native Union (you may have heard of its Jump Cable and its fancy marble iPhone case), and Will Matters comes from Rubix (of Augment modular iPhone case fame, but its wireless battery case didn't take off). Their Kickstarter campaign has just gone live and it's offering a basic pack for just $50, but you'll probably want to pay more for the extra containers or even go for the "Couple's Pack" options. If all goes well, these will be shipping in June later this year.
Update: With four more days to go before the campaign ends, the Prepd Pack has already raised over $1 million, meaning the stretch goal for dedicated cold packs has been unlocked.
