Manual or Assigned Intakes

Plan & Token Requirements

Feature available in the following LogMeal Plans:

Accessible by the following User Types:

What It Does

Manual Intakes allow creating a meal intake without image-based prediction. For each food item, provide either an existing dish ID and/or, optionally, omit the dish id and provide an ingredient breakdown. You may also supply quantity (serving size) and easy-to-modulate ingredient levels (salt, sugar, oil).
This is ideal when users forget to take a photo, when recording historic meals, or when professionals need to log meals on behalf of users.

Creating Custom Dishes From Scratch

Optionally, an APIUser or APIUserManager can create a one-off food item from scratch without relying on a pre-existing catalog dish ID.

To execute this workflow, follow these 3 steps:

1. Define the Ingredient List
Retrieve valid ingredient IDs through GET /dataset/ingredients, then determine the ingredients and quantities. You may preview the resulting nutrition by calling POST /nutrition/recipe/compute_nutrients.

2. Create the Intake
Call POST /v2/intake/manualInput/{userId}. Omit the dish id and provide a non-empty ingredients list containing valid ingredientId values. Add an optional non-empty dishes[].name to label that individual ingredient-only item. The independent root-level intake_name labels the complete intake.

3. Modify the Whole-Intake Name
If the user wants to rename the complete intake after it has been created, use POST /intake/{imageId}/modify_name. This edits intake_name; it is not an item-level rename mechanism.

Related use case: Create a Custom Dish from Scratch with a Manual Intake

When to Use It / Outcomes

• Users don’t have a photo or prefer manual entry.
• Professionals need to add meals for their managed users, individually or in bulk.
• You want to recreate meals from a known dish ID and optionally customize ingredients and quantity.
• You want to create a one-off food item from scratch using ingredient IDs, without creating or selecting an existing dish.
• Output: JSON with the created intake (ID, timestamp, dish list) and any overrides applied; on bulk/assign endpoints, creation results per user.

Feature-Specific Details

• Add one or more food items to record what was eaten.
• For each food item, provide either a valid dish id or a non-empty ingredients list with valid ingredientId values.
• Specify easy-to-modulate ingredient levels (salt, sugar, oil) as high, medium, low, or none.
• Include a serving size in grams for each dish so the system can scale ingredient quantities automatically.
• Add a timestamp for when the meal was eaten (defaults to the current time if not provided).
• If both a dish id and ingredients are provided, the supplied ingredients replace the default recipe for that dish.
• If the dish id is omitted, the supplied ingredients define the complete recipe and are used to calculate serving size, food groups, nutritional information, and Nutri-Score.
• Add an optional non-empty name to an ingredient-only item to populate that item's foodName and recipe_per_item[].name values. The text is preserved as submitted and is not translated or resolved against the dish catalog.
• A name supplied on an item with a valid catalog id never overrides the catalog-derived name.
• Use the root-level intake_name only as an optional label for the complete intake.
• The system automatically adjusts nutrition based on your quantities and levels.
• Managers can quickly log or assign meals for one or many users at once.

Related Endpoints

Use the following endpoints to create and manage manual intakes:

• POST /intake/manualInput/{userId} → 🔴 🔵 Create a manual intake for a specific user.

• POST /intake/manualInput/bulkAssign → 🔵 **Create manual intakes in bulk for one or multiple users.

• Maintenance helpers:

  • POST /intake/modifyNutritionalInfo → 🔴 🔵 Modify the nutritional info of an uploaded intake.
  • POST /intake/modifyTimestamp → ⚫ 🔵 🔴 Set/override the intake timestamp.
  • DELETE /intake/{imageId} → ⚫ 🔵 🔴 Remove an uploaded intake. This is applicable for any kind of intake (image-based, manual, barcode-based, etc.)

• Optional lookup helpers:

  • GET /dataset/ingredients → ⚫ 🔴 🔵 List available ingredients (IDs, names, measures).

Typical Workflow

1. Collect inputs: for each food item, provide either a dish id and/or, optionally, a non-empty ingredients list. Ingredient-only items may also include an item-level name. Optionally include levels, quantity, timestamp, and the independent root-level intake_name for the complete intake.
2. Single user: call POST /intake/manualInput/{userId}.
3. Bulk/assignment (managers): call POST /intake/manualInput/bulkAssign.
4. (Optional) Adjust via POST /intake/modifyNutritionalInfo and/or POST /intake/modifyTimestamp.
5. Store & display the new intake in History and progress dashboards.