Why I'm building Forkbell
Every calorie app made me search for a roti and pick between eleven entries. So I stopped logging, like everyone does. This is the app I wanted instead.
By Gajendra Singh Rathore2 min read
I've logged food in most of the big apps. Each time it went the same way. Search "roti". Scroll past entries that say 71, 85, 104, 120 and 297 calories for what is, in my kitchen, the same roti. Pick one. Feel vaguely wrong about it. Fix the portion because "1 serving" means nothing. Two minutes later, one meal is logged.
By the second week I was skipping dinner logs. By the third I'd quit. Ask around a gym and you'll hear the same story, with small variations, from almost everyone who has tried.
The problem is the food, not the discipline
Calorie databases were built from packaged food. A barcode gives you one exact answer. Home-cooked food has no barcode, and most of what people in India eat is home-cooked. So the database fills up with guesses typed in by other users, and the app makes you choose between them.
Serving sizes make it worse. Nobody measures dal in grams at the table. People eat a katori of dal, two pieces of roti, a spoon of ghee. An app that wants grams is asking you to do a conversion at every meal, forever.
And then there's speed. Logging that takes two minutes gets skipped. Logging that takes three seconds becomes a habit. Every extra tap is a reason to stop.
What Forkbell does differently
You type what you ate, in your own words. "2 roti, dal, katori curd." That's the whole interaction.
Behind it, Indian dishes come from the Indian Food Composition Tables, the reference published by the National Institute of Nutrition, with household servings attached. Everything else comes from USDA. Every number in the app shows where it came from, and estimates say they're estimates.
Your workout goes in the same log. Sets, reps and weight sit next to your meals and your weight trend on one screen, because for most of us those are one project, not two apps.
What it won't do at first
The first version is small on purpose. No social feed, no meal plans, no barcode scanning, no photo estimates. Those come later, once the core loop is fast and the food data is trustworthy. Shipping a small thing that works beats shipping a large thing that's slow.
Where this is going
Closed beta from the waitlist in October. Public launch on iOS and Android in November. Until then I'll post every day about what I'm learning, mostly about food data, and send one email a week to the list.
If you've quit a calorie app for the reasons above, join the waitlist. And reply to the welcome email with what you use today. I read every one.