← All Addons

Diet Manager

widget

Diet Manager

A food and recipe database with a daily nutrition diary and a grocery list, built to replace Cronometer. All data — categories, foods, recipes, the diary, and the grocery list — lives in one persisted JSON note, so it's a single note you can back up, inspect, or migrate.

Setup

  1. Install the addon and enable it.
  2. Open its launcher note (diet-manager@beatlink) to use the widget.
  3. Optionally, open the addon's settings screen to set daily nutrient targets and a USDA FoodData Central API key for food lookup (Open Food Facts lookup needs no key and works out of the box).

Foods

The Foods tab is your ingredient database. Each food has a name, an optional brand, a serving size/unit (e.g. "100 g" or "1 cup"), and nutrition facts per that serving: calories, protein, carbs, fat, fiber, sugar, saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol.

Add Food opens a form with a search box at the top that queries two sources at once:

Results from both sources are merged into one list, each tagged with its source. Picking a result prefills the serving size and nutrition fields, which you can still edit before saving. If one source's request fails (e.g. an invalid USDA key), its results are just omitted rather than blocking the other source's results.

Nutrition can always be entered manually instead, regardless of lookup availability.

Multiple units per food

Nutrition is stored once, per the food's own serving. Other Units in the food form adds extra ways to measure that same food, each written as an equivalence with a count on both sides: for a tortilla recorded per 100 g, 1 tortilla = 100 g means logging 1 tortilla and logging 100 g give identical nutrition, and a pack of six is 1 pack = 600 g. Counting the left side lets you enter whatever's written on the packaging without doing the division yourself — 4 tray = 30 egg records that a tray is 7.5 eggs.

The right-hand side doesn't have to be the serving unit either: it can be another unit defined on the same food, so packaging that nests can be entered the way it's written —

1 tray = 5 box
1 box  = 6 egg

— and a tray resolves to 30 eggs by following the chain down to the serving unit. If a chain loops (1 box = 2 tray alongside 1 tray = 3 box) or points at a unit that isn't defined, the form says so and those units simply aren't offered until it's fixed; nothing else is affected.

Everywhere an amount of a food is entered — a diary entry and a recipe ingredient — a unit dropdown offers that food's whole serving, its serving unit, and each of these extra units, and the nutrition is converted from whichever is picked. Nothing is duplicated: change the nutrition facts once and every unit follows.

Categories

Foods and recipes can each carry any number of free-form categories (e.g. Protein, Snack, Dairy), added in their form: type a name and press Enter or Add. The field offers every category already in use the moment you click it, and typing narrows the list; anything not on it can just be typed. Categories are de-duplicated case-insensitively and always shown in alphabetical order.

Categories nest, using / as the separator: Protein/Meat/Poultry is Poultry inside Meat inside Protein. Typing a path creates every level it needs, so tagging a food Protein/Meat makes Protein exist too. Filtering or grouping by a parent includes everything nested under it.

Both the Foods and the Recipes tab use categories three ways:

  • Filter — the dropdown in the toolbar narrows the table to one category and everything nested under it, or to (uncategorized) for items with none.
  • Group by category — the checkbox splits the table into a section per category, indented to show the tree, each with its own count. An item in several categories appears in each of their sections, and a parent still gets a header when only its subcategories have items. The checkbox state is remembered across reloads (per browser/client, not synced), separately per tab.
  • Sort — click any column header (including Brand and Categories) to sort by it; click again to reverse.

A food's brand is free text with a dropdown of brands already in use, and foods are listed as "Oats (Quaker)" wherever a food is picked, so two versions of the same thing stay apart. Each food also takes a free-text comment for notes that belong to the food itself — where you buy it, how the serving was measured, why the numbers differ from the packet. It shows as its own sortable column in the table. A grocery line keeps its own separate comment, specific to that shopping trip; turn on Prefill grocery comments from the food in Settings to have a new line start from the food's comment, which you can then edit without touching the food.

Every picker of foods or recipes — the diary's, the grocery list's, and the recipe ingredient one — is the same control: grouped into one section per category, uncategorised items last, brands in the labels.

Recipes

The Recipes tab builds recipes out of foods already in your database. A recipe has a name, a servings count and serving unit (serving, bowl, slice...), any number of categories, a free-text comment for method notes or variations (its own sortable column in the table), and a list of ingredients (food + amount, in that food's own serving unit). Nutrition per serving is computed automatically from its ingredients and re-derives whenever an ingredient's underlying food is edited — recipes never store their own copy of nutrition facts.

The tab filters, groups, and sorts by category exactly like the Foods tab does.

Grocery tab

The Grocery tab is a manually maintained shopping list built from foods already in the database. Pick a food, type an amount, and set a unit; the picker only offers foods that aren't on the list yet, since a second line for the same food would just split its amount in two. the unit prefills from that food's serving unit and can be changed per line, so a food measured in 100 g for nutrition can be shopped for as 2 loaf.

Each line carries its own brand, prefilled from the food's brand and editable per line — handy when you'll take whichever brand is cheapest. Each line also takes a free-text comment — "corn only", "brand X", "whatever's on offer" — set when adding the line or edited in place afterwards.

Amounts are entered by hand — nothing is derived from recipes or the diary. Each line has a checkbox for "bought", which strikes it through, and Clear Checked removes all ticked lines at once. Amount and unit stay editable in place, and a line's unit dropdown also offers whatever units its food defines, so 2 pack is as easy to shop for as 500 g.

Group by category splits the list into a section per category of the line's food — a shopping list ordered by aisle, in effect. The checkbox state is remembered across reloads.

Categories tab

The Categories tab manages the category tree itself:

  • Add Category creates one up front, before anything uses it, so it's offered in the food and recipe forms from the start. The dropdown beside it picks a parent, or leave it on (top level); a name containing / also creates a nested path directly.
  • The Foods and Recipes columns count what carries each category directly, and in parentheses the total including its subcategories.
  • The edit icon renames a category everywhere at once — every food and recipe using it is updated in the same save. Because the name is the full path, renaming also moves a category: renaming Protein to Macros/Protein carries Protein/Meat along as Macros/Protein/Meat. Renaming onto a name that already exists merges the two.
  • The trash icon deletes a category and its subcategories, removing them from every food and recipe. It asks first, naming how many items are affected. The foods and recipes themselves are never deleted.

The list is the union of categories created here, any category an item actually carries, and every parent those paths imply — so a category typed straight into a food form still appears here.

Units tab

Foods, recipes and grocery lines share one unit vocabulary, and the Units tab manages it:

  • Add Unit creates one up front, before anything uses it, so it's offered everywhere from the start.
  • The Foods, Recipes and Grocery columns count what currently uses each unit.
  • The edit icon renames a unit everywhere at once — every food, recipe and grocery line using it is updated in the same save. Renaming onto an existing unit merges the two, which is also how you consolidate gram and g.
  • The trash icon deletes a unit. A unit still in use cannot be deleted: those records have to keep some unit, and the list would show it again regardless (it is the union of the managed list and what's in use). Rename it onto another unit first to move everything over, then delete it.

Every field that takes a unit — a food's serving unit, a recipe's serving unit (serving, bowl, slice...), and each grocery line — offers this list as a dropdown the moment you click it. A unit that isn't on the list can still just be typed, and it joins the vocabulary as soon as it's used.

Diary

The Diary tab is the daily log. Pick a date (or use Today), then log foods or recipes eaten that day with a servings multiplier. The day's running totals for every tracked nutrient are shown against the daily targets configured in Settings, with any nutrient over target highlighted.

Settings

Open the addon's launcher note for the settings screen:

  • USDA Lookup — paste a USDA FoodData Central API key to include USDA results in food search. Open Food Facts results appear regardless of this setting.
  • Grocery — Prefill grocery comments from the food starts a new grocery line's comment from the food's own comment. Off by default; the line's copy is always independent once created.
  • Daily Targets — a target value per tracked nutrient, compared against each day's diary totals. A target of 0 is treated as "no target" and shown without a comparison.
  • Render Note — pick an existing note to become a second place the diet manager shows up. Selecting it converts that note into a render note pointing at the widget and stamps its icon; clearing it reverts the previously-chosen note back to a text note. Apply render wiring re-runs the wiring on the note already selected, for when it was set while the addon was disabled.

Import and export

The tab bar's Export JSON downloads the whole database (categories, foods, recipes, diary, and grocery list) as a .json file, and Import JSON loads one back in. Import merges: every category, food, recipe, diary entry, and grocery line in the file is added by id alongside whatever is already in the database, so importing the same file twice — or a partial export from another install — never duplicates entries or wipes existing data. A file that isn't valid database JSON reports an error and leaves the database untouched.

The import format is the storage format below.

Storage format

The whole database is one JSON code note:

{
    "categories": ["Protein", "Protein/Meat", "Snack"],
    "units": ["bowl", "g", "pack"],
    "foods": {
        "a1b2c3d4": {
            "id": "a1b2c3d4",
            "name": "Chicken Breast",
            "brand": "",
            "comment": "",
            "servingSize": 100,
            "servingUnit": "g",
            "portions": [{ "unit": "breast", "amount": 1, "size": 170, "sizeUnit": "g" }],
            "tags": ["Protein/Meat"],
            "nutrients": {
                "calories": 165, "protein": 31, "carbs": 0, "fat": 3.6,
                "fiber": 0, "sugar": 0, "saturatedFat": 1, "sodium": 74, "cholesterol": 85
            }
        }
    },
    "recipes": {
        "e5f6g7h8": {
            "id": "e5f6g7h8",
            "name": "Chicken Salad",
            "comment": "",
            "servings": 2,
            "servingUnit": "bowl",
            "tags": ["Protein"],
            "ingredients": [{ "foodId": "a1b2c3d4", "amount": 1, "unit": "breast" }]
        }
    },
    "diary": {
        "2026-07-22": [
            { "id": "i1j2k3l4", "kind": "food", "refId": "a1b2c3d4", "servings": 1, "unit": "breast", "loggedAt": "2026-07-22T12:00:00.000Z" }
        ]
    },
    "grocery": [
        { "id": "m1n2o3p4", "foodId": "a1b2c3d4", "brand": "Store own", "amount": 2, "unit": "pack", "comment": "corn only", "done": false }
    ]
}

A food's or recipe's tags array is its categories, each a /-separated path; an item saved before categories existed simply has none. The top-level categories array is the managed list — it only needs to hold categories nothing carries yet, since the tab shows the union of the two plus every implied parent, and it may be absent entirely in an older database. grocery is likewise optional and its lines are independent of the diary. units is the managed unit list, and like categories it only needs to hold units nothing uses yet. A food's portions are its extra units: amount of unit equals size of sizeUnit, so one of that unit is size / amount of sizeUnit. sizeUnit may name another portion (chains resolve down to the serving unit) and defaults to the serving unit when absent; a missing amount is one of them. Both defaults are what portions meant before either side could be varied. A diary entry's or ingredient's unit says which unit its amount is in; an entry with no unit counts whole servings and an ingredient with no unit is an amount in the serving unit, which is exactly what they meant before units existed, so older databases keep their totals.

Diary entries are keyed by ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD). A recipe's own nutrition is never stored — it's always recomputed from its current ingredients at render time, same as a diary entry's contribution is always recomputed from the food or recipe it references.

Limitations

  • Both lookup sources search by name only; there's no barcode scanning.
  • Open Food Facts is community-sourced and doesn't always report every nutrient (cholesterol in particular is often missing); missing values default to 0 rather than being left blank.
  • A deleted food or recipe leaves any recipe ingredient or diary entry that referenced it showing as "(deleted)" rather than being cleaned up automatically.