One of the benefits of doing a database nutrition analysis is that a lot of your ingredients should already be in the database, making it a quick process.

However you'll eventually run into the case where you have to add your own ingredient, which slows everything down a bit. Trust us, we do it all the time. It gets better, but it's still a little tedious and error-prone. That's why we verify user-added ingredients so you know which ones are reliable.

Copying an Ingredient

There are a few cases where creating your own ingredient from scratch and inputting all the nutrients is needlessly tedious, so we added an option to copy an ingredient to your own account. These ingredients will always be private and doing so allows you to do a few things:

• Say you have organic and non-organic versions of the same food, say a carrot. You can make a copy so they'll have the same nutrition info, but you can now input different prices for the two and can also list them differently in ingredient lists.
• If you are processing an ingredient in a certain way and want to modify the nutrition info slightly (maybe according to the nutrition retention table) without re-inputting everything.

If you're signed in and have access to an ingredient, you can copy it and make your own version.

Takeaways and Final Thoughts

Those are just a couple of the use cases for copying an ingredient. It's a simple and powerful feature that we've already seen lots of users take advantage of. I'm sure some are using it in ways we didn't expect.

Let us know what you think and if you have any other ideas for taking advantage of this tool.