Nutritional info is a little tricky. Lots of recipe sites that display nutritional information have two sets of info. One that people see when they view the page and one that they show to other software. The info that they show to other software is just plain wrong. The reason for this is that Google gives a higher search ranking to any recipe that is under 100 calories per serving, has five ingredients or less and takes less than 20 minutes to prepare. ChefTap has some complex code that detects when a site is lying about the number of ingredients which was nontrivial. ChefTap would need the same thing for nutritional info. So, we’d like to include nutritional info when available, but it’s going to take some engineering.
I also looked really hard into extracting nutritional data from recipes and the short answer is that it’s not feasible at this point. Yes, ChefTap could look up the nutritional content of individual ingredients, but doing that would be incredibly misleading. For instance, fried chicken calls for 5 quarts of vegetable oil, but you don’t consume 5 quarts of vegetable oil in the finished dish. An app that provided accurate nutritional information would have to know the cooking medium absorption rate and the surface area of the item being cooked along with the preparation of the item. e.g. Are the chicken parts breaded before frying? Conversely, pork belly and duck usually have less fat after cooking unless the duck is prepared confit which allows the duck meat to absorb more fat than other cooking methods. I also looked into using the USDA nutritional database to estimate nutritional info for food after preparation, however all values are based on weight (nutrient amount/gram) *after* cooking so the app would have to know for instance, what a pound of bacon weighs after cooking.