Foodzilla Platform V2: Next-Generation Nutrition App

Our next-generation cloud architecture unlocks unmatched performance and features for our current and future customers.

I'd like to start of the post by thanking all of our users, leads, customers and service providers who worked with us and helped us make Foodzilla better and improve the nutrition journey for all dietitians, nutritionists and nutrition coaches worldwide.

The team at Foodzilla has been working tirelessly for the last 6 months to migrate our infrastructure and code to a next-generation cloud architecture to unlock unmatched performance and features for our current and future customers. In this post, I'll detail the work we've done and what the future of Foodzilla will look like.

Migration update

The migration will take place this Saturday (October 30th, 8PM, Auckland Time, New Zealand) where we will move all of the data to the new cloud infrastructure and enable it for everyone. It is expected to take less than one hour and both the web and mobile apps will be suspended until the process is completed. Emails and alerts will be sent to all customers on the day as a reminder. Once it is done, an email will be sent to all customers with information on how to access your account.

Why Migrate?

At the beginning of 2021, we've decided to start thinking about solutions to the problems we had in 2019-2020 and to achieve our goal of becoming a "Next-Generation" app for dietitians, nutritionists and nutrition coaches. We found out that while we innovated with new features (such as real-time data sync, mobile app customizations controlled by a coach, unlimited flexible meal planning...etc.), we started falling back on the basics (such as performance, stability, mobile and web sync behavior, login experience issues...etc.)

We started experimenting with our ideas and reached out to several providers, we've done architecture reviews and tested our new code for benchmarks and decided to go ahead and start working on migrating everything to our new next-generation cloud architecture. We expected the process to take 3-4 months. We were wrong, it took us about 6-7 months to complete this transition. However, when compared to bigger companies, our timeline is not slow by any means.

A decision like this at a big company is basically impossible to get through. Product managers are not likely to sign-off on work that will effectively slow down the product's growth in the short term. A complete code re-write, architecture and transition of cloud providers can take years to come to fruition. However, at Foodzilla we have a long-term vision for a nutrition product that is better, faster, more delightful and affordable for professionals wherever they are in the world.

2.0 Improvements

Version 2 of the Foodzilla platform will be live this weekend and has the following improvements – TLDR; faster and better:

1. - Simpler login experience using email/password instead of verification code for both nutrition coaches and mobile app clients
2. -Significant speed improvements for creating recipes, meal plans, logging food, searching for food, creating ingredients, and similar operations by 3-4x
3. - No more syncing issues on mobile and web apps
4. - More secure and robust data storage (including data encryption at rest and up to the minute backups)
5. -Better messaging system between you and your clients
6. -Upgraded syncing engine for the mobile app
7. -Much faster mobile app on both Android and iOS
8. -More fixes and improvements for you to discover...

Now that we're done with V2, and we've got this great foundation to build on, let's talk more about what's coming soon.

Upcoming Features

Meal Planning and Recipes

We talk with our customers, leads and visitors all the time and always gather feedback to improve and build the best version we can. Many of you asked us to improve our meal planning feature set and to make it easier and faster to create meal plans. Also improve on how recipes are created and allow importing recipes. These improvements will be the first to tackle in the next update.

More Food Databases

The other side of the spectrum is supporting more food databases (Asia, Europe, Middle East) and supermarket data such as Countdown/Woolworths/Walmart etc. We currently support New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and United States national food databases.

We will also bring in a brand new feature to let you search foods and ingredients better. For example, you can do a query like this: "Find me an ingredient or food in any database that has < 20 grams of carbs and 5 grams of fat in a 100 gram measurement" or like this: "Find all foods that have less than 200 calories in a 100 gram measurement". Similar to how you can ask Google any question and it returns an answer instantly, imagine a food-focused search with that level of performance and deep understanding of the underlying data.

Better Documentation

We're writing new material and video tutorials on how to use the apps as well as improving the overall user experience through more intuitive flows and UI design. Documentation will be integrated into the app so you can view things in context without having to leave the app into another site.

API Integrations

With the new architecture, we can now issue API keys for each user which will allow Foodzilla to integrate with other apps/software. The first one we will start with is Zapier. This will unlock integrating Foodzilla with popular apps like Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, Discord, Mailchimp, Trello, Google Drive, Acuity Scheduling, Google Forms, Stripe, Typeform, Instagram, Webflow, Microsoft Outlook and any other Zapier-enabled app.

Finally, we have two more surprise announcements that we will reveal after the 2.0 launch which we're very excited about. Again, our ultimate goal is to make Foodzilla faster, better, and more affordable for all professionals (and students) no matter where they are in the world. The 2.0 upgrade will help us achieve all of the these goals and our surprise announcements will have all details ;)

Thank you for reading and have a great day/evening.