Zadi started with a simple frustration: every nutrition app on the App Store mishandles Arabic food. We built the one we wished existed.
If you live in the Gulf and try to log a plate of maqluba in a Western calorie tracker, you'll either get a generic "rice and chicken" entry off by a few hundred calories, or you'll be searching for "upside-down Palestinian rice" and giving up. Same with kabsa, mansaf, shakshuka, fattoush. The food databases that power most apps were built for North American eaters.
Zadi was designed from day one for people who eat the way most of the Arab world actually eats — with an AI scanner that recognises real Gulf and Levantine dishes, an ingredient database that includes za'atar and labneh instead of just "Greek yoghurt", and a dietitian-style chat that understands when you ask "is kunafa ok with my macros today?"
Zadi is built and maintained by a UAE-based engineer who's spent 15+ years running customer-facing operations and the last few years building Flutter apps in his off-hours.
Zadi is a tracking and education tool — not a substitute for a registered dietitian or a doctor. The macro and micronutrient values we display come from public food databases (USDA FoodData Central as the primary source), AI-assisted recognition of homemade and restaurant dishes, and barcode lookups for packaged products. Where AI estimates a value, we show it as an estimate, not a fact.
We don't write health-advice content lightly. Articles on the journal are reviewed before publication and updated when better evidence emerges. If you spot something that looks wrong — please email and we'll fix it.
Your meals, weight, and health data live on a Supabase Postgres database in Singapore with row-level security so only you can see your own rows. We don't sell user data and we don't run ad tracking inside the app. Read the full privacy policy for details.
Bug reports, feature requests, partnership conversations, or "your translation of foul mudammas is wrong" — all welcome. Write to support@zadi.ink.