Wednesday, October 26, 2005

How about dietary analysis at the checkstand?

With grocery stores ringing up packaged foods by barcode and bulk foods by price code and weight, I think it would be easy for them to provide a dietary breakdown right alongside the prices on your receipt. The manufacturers of the barcoded groceries can provide the specific nutritional breakdown for their items whereas for the breakdown on a weighed item with a price code that means "apple," for example, the register can compute that from the USDA data tables for specific foods. If you wanted to ring up the ingredients of each meal sequentially, or group all your snack items together, the grocery could print dietary subtotals for them on your receipt.

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