Abstract: A method of determining the nutritional content of a menu item is described. The method includes receiving from a restaurant patron's camera an image of at least a portion of a restaurant menu and converting, using an optical character recognition (OCR) algorithm, at least portions of the image to text. The method also includes identifying menu dishes from the text using a matching algorithm with a database of dishes. Further, the method includes sending to a mobile device of a user the menu items identified and receiving from the user a selected menu item.

Abstract: A system for recommending restaurant menu items to a user is described. The system includes a mobile application running on a mobile device of the user. The mobile device accesses information from a server accessing a database of menu items that match with nutritional or dietary needs of a user of the mobile application. The database of menu items is created by a crawler algorithm that finds and stores information in the database relating to menu items at restaurants and for each of those menu items matching a recipe with nutritional and ingredient information to the recipe.