Calorie counter for iPhone: 6 criteria to choose (and check) in 2026

1. What's free, and what isn't

"Free" on the App Store means "free to download". The dominant business model in food tracking is subscription: the app installs at no cost, then a daily feature — barcode scanning, long history, export, statistics — moves behind a paywall after a few days.

Where to check: the In-App Purchases section of the App Store listing shows the app's real price tiers and their labels. It's the most reliable part of the listing, because it comes from Apple's billing rather than the developer's marketing copy. Read it before the screenshots. We collected those tiers for the main apps on the market in our 2026 calorie app price comparison.

The classic trap: the auto-renewing free trial. It's legal and common, but it turns into a charge if you do nothing. See also our piece on calorie apps with no subscription.

2. The App Privacy label on the listing

Since late 2020, every App Store listing carries an App Privacy section: the categories of data the developer declares it collects, split into three blocks — data used to track you, data linked to you, data not linked to you. For a nutrition app you'll often see identifiers, health and fitness data, usage data, sometimes location.

The nuance: that label is declared by the developer. Apple enforces the format, not a line-by-line audit. So use it as a first filter — an app that declares "Data Used to Track You" rarely does so out of excess caution — but not as proof. The useful complement is the privacy policy: if it's vague about who receives the data, that's a signal in itself. We detail this reading method in what actually leaves your phone.

3. Where the nutrition values come from

This is the least visible and most decisive criterion: two apps can show two different values for the same ground beef, because they don't draw on the same database. Three families of sources coexist.

• Official tables. CIQUAL, the French food composition table published by ANSES, and the USDA's FoodData Central. Lab-measured, referenced, updated in cycles.
• Collaborative databases. Open Food Facts for packaged products: very broad barcode coverage, quality that varies per entry, since the content is contributed by users.
• User-generated proprietary databases. The historical model of the big apps: anyone can create a food. Huge volume, frequent duplicates and typos.

Where to check: look inside the app to see whether a food entry states its source. An app that never tells you where a number comes from is asking you to take it on faith.

4. Nutri-Score: computed or copied?

Nutri-Score is an official label whose algorithm was revised in 2022-2023; in France, the applicable version is set by the decree of 14 March 2025. Some apps display it only when it's already on the packaging or in the product database; others recompute it from the per-100 g values. The difference is concrete: with no recomputation, an unlabelled product shows nothing. The calculation is broken down in our Nutri-Score explainer, and the revision in what changes with the new formula.

5. The Apple Health connection — and which way it flows

On iPhone, a nutrition app can connect to Health (HealthKit). The question isn't whether it connects, but in which direction: read (the app reads your activity), write (the app writes your meals into Health), or both. An app that writes into Health is effectively sharing its data with every other app allowed to read from it.

Where to check: Settings → Privacy & Security → Health, or the Health app → Sharing → Apps. iOS shows, per app, which categories are allowed for reading and writing, and lets you revoke them one by one, at any time.

6. The airplane-mode test

An app with an embedded food database works with no network for logging; an app that queries a server on every search won't work on the subway, on a plane, or abroad without a data plan. That's not just comfort: it's also an indicator of architecture, and therefore of what travels.

Where to check: turn on airplane mode, open the app, search a food and log it. Ten seconds. Our article on the offline calorie counter covers the cases where it really matters.

How Radish scores on these 6 criteria

For transparency, here are our own answers — checkable in the app and on the App Store listing.

• Free: the core app is free — log, food search, barcode scanning, Nutri-Score, macros, 11 vitamins and minerals, personal recipes. No account to create.
• Data: your food log, history and goals stay on your phone. Two features, and only those, send information out when you trigger them: barcode scanning, which queries Open Food Facts, and AI meal description, which is optional and consent-based. It's written plainly in our privacy terms.
• Sources: values from CIQUAL (ANSES) and the USDA for generic foods, from Open Food Facts for scanned products. Our sources page details the origin of each data family.
• Nutri-Score: recomputed from per-100 g values, following the revised algorithm adopted by the French decree of 14 March 2025.
• Health: optional connection, read-only: Radish never writes into the Health app, and that information does not leave your device.
• Offline: the food database is embedded; logging, search, Nutri-Score and history work in airplane mode. Only product scanning and the optional AI need a connection.

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General information about choosing an app, not medical advice. A calorie counter is a tracking tool: it does not replace advice from a health professional.