(Apologies if you're an OCR guru and this is a stupid comment, but...) I wonder if it would be easier to get an MVP together using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A quick Google search reveals that there are lots of commercial products providing OCR on nutrition labels, but getting open source OCR to work reliably with phone-quality images (poor lighting, curvature of containers, etc) is tricky.

Either way, I think OCR-as-a-service would be really useful, and nutrition labels are probably a great place to start. I think there's lots of room for improvement in the nutrition/meal planning space.

I know FoodEssentials used to do this on mTurk. I did them myself on that platform. They haven't been around in a while, though. I'd be more than happy to enter nutritional label information on mTurk should that method be chosen.

I don't know how hard it might be, but we have a team already (wow HN), and have started the work.

You can scan barcode most of the time.

Just be aware that they're proposing a change to the current format used in the United States. This post covers the proposed changes:

http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/uc...