Snapchat's Food Scan Feature Can Show Food Names, Recipes And How To Make It!

Through the Food Scan feature on Snapchat, users can find out food recipes. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA – Snapchat is a popular application that can do many things. Includes the ability to scan food and find the recipe!

Initially Snapchat was a pretty simple app. But the app now offers text messaging and group conversations, social media-like Stories, original video content, and a Spotlight feature to emulate TikTok — and that's only scratching the surface. Snapchat can often feel a little complicated, and regardless of how much is already in the app, Snap's parent company is still adding new features to it all the time.

One of those features is something called “Food Scan”. It was exactly what the name implied. Snapchat users can scan a food item with the Snapchat app, identify it, and then get a description of the item along with some handy recipes.

Better yet, using Food Scan is a breeze. Open the Snapchat app on your phone, find the food you want to scan, place it in front of the phone's camera, then tap the Scan button at the bottom of the screen (the square with the circle in the middle).

After scanning something with Food Scan, Snapchatters have several options available. The first result is a Wikipedia entry showing a brief description of the scanned food. The first few sentences appear live on Snapchat, but if someone wants a more detailed explanation, tapping 'Learn More' will take you to the full Wikipedia entry.

Below is a selection of recommended recipes as they all contain the food you scanned. Each recipe shows a thumbnail photo, a description of the dish, a rating of five stars, and how long it took to make.

If you decide to make one of the recipes, just tap on it to see the full instructions on the Allrecipes website. You can view it in the built-in Snapchat browser, or tap the three dots in the upper-right corner to see some of the other controls, including the ability to open the recipe in the browser app of your choice or share it with friends.

What's particularly impressive about Food Scan is how wide the range of cuisines can be. Snapchat says it can recognize more than 1.200 ingredients, and use them, recommending more than 4.500 different recipes (all from Allrecipes).

This may not be something most users will use on a daily basis, but it is a good feature to keep in mind for those times where it can come in handy. Found an ingredient you're not sure what to do? Take out your phone, open Snapchat, scan, and start cooking.