By Janina
We’ve been building and expanding a fitness & nutrition app from scratch 🥑 📲 A recent challenge? Integrating an external ingredient database to reduce manual effort for admins and expand ingredient variety for users—sounds simple enough, I thought.
Before jumping in, I focused on feasibility first (before even thinking about viability). The must-haves:
✅ Re-enabling existing core features
✅ Integrated barcode scanning
✅ German ingredient search & supermarket products (To be honest, at first I assumed this wouldn’t be an issue — my big mistake 😆 )
What I found though...
🚫 Established ingredient API providers (Edamam, Spoonacular, Nutritionix): No German coverage.
🧐 Open Food Facts (the only one with German data): Unreliable, noisy af, and focused on branded foods—meaning the admin (my customer) would still need to do lots of manual QA and curation.
💡 YAZIO (market leading nutrition app): Instead of relying on external providers, they built their own manually curated database for high quality and accuracy. Turns out, this is a major competitive advantage in the German market.
So what I told my customer...
💡 A high-quality ingredient database isn’t just a backend task—it’s a marketable asset and a real competitive differentiator.
❌ DO NOT integrate the open-source database —it would reduce product quality and still require manual work.
✅ Instead, double down on manual curation (what the customer was already doing).
What's the outcome of that?
➡️ Less revenue for me, but a better product, happier users, and a stronger business for my customer.
For me, that’s product management in a service business - sometimes the best way to build something that lasts is to turn down the quick wins 💸
