How We Estimate Nutrition in Every Meal
We want to make it easy for everyone to have a balanced diet that's works well for their individual circumstances. Whether you're an athlete looking to maximize recovery, someone managing specific health conditions, committed to loose weight, or simply focused on overall wellness, understanding what's in your food is essential.
Why Nutrition Transparency Matters
By providing these nutritional estimates, we hope to:
Enable Informed Choices: Know what you're putting in your body so you can make decisions aligned with your personal health goals.
Support Dietary Balance: Make it simpler to achieve nutritional balance across your meals throughout the day or week.
Enable Personalization: Help you select meals that complement your unique nutritional needs, whether you're focused on protein intake, managing carbohydrates, or increasing specific micronutrients.
We believe good nutrition shouldn't require a degree in dietetics. Our goal is to provide transparent, useful information that makes healthy eating more accessible for everyone.
Our Thoughtful Approach
Many of you have asked how we determine the nutritional values of our soups and stews. Here's our practical approach:
Reliable Data Sources: We source our baseline nutrition information from the USDA FoodData Central database (https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/), which provides comprehensive food composition data for thousands of foods.
Ingredient Mapping: Each ingredient in our recipes is mapped to its corresponding unprocessed form in the database. This gives us starting values for macros and micronutrients.
Raw Calculation: We calculate the estimated nutritional content of each ingredient based on the weight used in our recipes, then sum these values to determine the total nutritional profile of each dish in its unprocessed state.
Cooking Adjustments: We apply nutrition retention factors that account for potential nutrient losses during the cooking process. Different cooking methods affect nutrients differently—for instance, simmering may preserve more nutrients than prolonged boiling, and fat-soluble vitamins tend to be more stable than water-soluble ones during cooking.
Final Calculations: Once we've adjusted for cooking effects, we compile the final nutritional estimates for each meal we create.
Understanding the Limitations
We want to be transparent: this approach has limitations. Food composition naturally varies based on growing conditions, seasonality, and other factors. Additionally, cooking methods affect nutritional retention in ways that can be difficult to predict with perfect accuracy. We use specific retention factors for various nutrients. Here are some representative examples from our database:
Water-soluble vitamins (most vulnerable to cooking):
Vitamin C: 50% retention
Folate: 58% retention
Vitamin B1 (Thiamine): 65% retention
Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine): 65% retention
Fat-soluble vitamins (more stable during cooking):
Vitamin A: 80% retention Vitamin
D: 85% retention
Vitamin E: 82% retention
Vitamin K: 80% retention
Minerals (generally well-preserved):
Sodium: 95% retention
Calcium: 92% retention
Iron: 92% retention
Potassium: 85% retention
Macronutrients:
Protein: 92% retention
Total carbohydrates: 92% retention
Total fat: 92% retention
Energy (calories): 97% retention
The values we provide should be considered good estimates rather than absolute measurements. They're helpful guidelines for making informed food choices, but they aren't laboratory-precise measurements of each individual batch we produce.
Nutrition for Every Individual
We recognize that "healthy" means different things to different people. That's why we offer options across the dietary spectrum:
Protein-rich options for strength training
Plant-focused meals for those preferring plant-based nutrition
Nutrient-dense formulations for general health
Low-carb selections for those following ketogenic approaches
Our detailed nutrition information helps you select the meals that best support your personal health journey, making balanced nutrition effortless and enjoyable.
Our Continuous Learning
Our approach to nutritional estimation is always evolving. As we learn more and receive feedback, we refine our methods to provide better information. We're not perfect, but we're committed to giving you the best estimates we can with the tools available.
If you have specific dietary needs or questions about certain nutrients in our meals, please reach out. While we can't promise laboratory precision, we're happy to share what we know and help you make informed choices for your unique nutritional journey.