Fast Food Genius Review

Fast food restaurants do one thing, and they do it well; that is provide quick, easy, and convenient meals to a nation of people constantly running around. How do you even keep track of all the calories in a Venti Café Mocha from Starbucks? Or know how long it will take to burn off the calories from a Honey Bourbon Chicken sandwich from Quiznos? Fast Food Genius is looking to shed some light on just this question.

Fast Food Genius is like a phonebook of food information for some of the most popular fast food joints that are scattered about this nation. Upon launching the app, you are greeted with a list of restaurants broken down alphabetically; a nice touch is the company logos included next to the names. Tapping on a restaurant will bring you into that restaurant's menu of consumables. Just tap on the food item you are questioning and you will be greeted with calorie, fat, cholesterol, sodium, and carb information in an easy to read breakdown.

To aid in finding food quickly, you may perform two different searches. The first happens right inside the chosen restaurant. Here you can search through the categories and products for a particular food item. There is also a global search, thus allowing you to search all items in every restaurant contained in the app. This global search is useful if you are looking to grab a chicken sandwich, but you want to eliminate your choices down to a few of the healthiest options.

One last feature is a calorie-burning calculator. You may choose between two to eight predefined activities from a list. Once you have these activities chosen, when you are evaluating the nutritional info of that burger from Burger King, tilt the phone on its side to get an estimate of how long it will take you to burn off the calories in that burger from one of your chosen activities. While this is not always a perfect depiction of calorie burning, it does a good job of establishing a baseline for the amount of impending exercise you will be doing later.

The developer does ask for feedback -- if you want a particular restaurant included, email them and they will try to add that restaurant. Hopefully they stand behind this, as the list of restaurants, while decent, is still lacking. The ability to modify the activity list, or even add your own local restaurants would go a long way to make this a must own app for any calorie conscious person.

Fast Food Genius provides a decent start to count calories for fast food items, but there isn’t enough here to get it down the road to a complete know it all app. The big restaurants like Starbucks, McDonalds, and Checkers make a cameo, but it is not a complete, or even extensive, list of restaurants. If you stick to the bigger chains there might be some value here, the rest of you calorie counters may want to wait for this to drop in price before you invest.

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