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About

Hi, I'm Alec.

TL;DR

Alec Zakhary, product manager and solo founder based in Belgrade, builds Nutrogine — a restaurant-aware calorie tracker. Not a registered dietitian. The methodology is research aggregation: cross-reference USDA FoodData Central, brand-published nutrition, and customer-reported portion data, then label every number with a Source Badge so users can verify rather than trust. App ships Q3 2026.

Alec Zakhary, founder of Nutrogine, in a Brooklyn art space
Brooklyn, late 2025. Photo: my phone.

I'm a product manager and solo founder. I've spent years building consumer software products and I'm currently working on Synaptic Relay. I'm based in Belgrade, and like a lot of remote workers, restaurants (or restaurant-style takeout) end up being a regular part of how I eat.

Why I built Nutrogine

I started looking seriously at calorie apps in 2024. MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, Cal AI, MacroFactor — all the obvious ones. They all worked, in the sense that you could log food. But every time I tried to log a restaurant bowl or salad, the numbers across apps disagreed by enough to actually matter.

That's not a niche complaint either. Reddit threads about Chipotle portion variance keep showing up; Wells Fargo analyst Zachary Fadem and team weighed 75 identical Chipotle bowls in 2024 and found 14–27 oz spreads; crowdsourced databases like MyFitnessPal show roughly 20–25% disagreement with USDA-verified reference values across spot-check audits (see our database analysis). None of the apps surface any of this.

So I started reading the Reddit threads myself. Cross-referencing what brands publish with what customers actually receive. Looking up the USDA FoodData Central numbers for individual ingredients. After a few weekends of this, I had a folder of cleaner restaurant data than any single app I'd paid for.

Nutrogine is that folder, made into a website. Every number on it has a source you can click — USDA, the brand's nutrition page, or a real customer report. If we don't know, we say "estimated".

What I'm not

I'm not a registered dietitian. I'm not a nutritionist. I have no medical credentials. I'll never tell you what's "good" or "bad" to eat — that's between you and a real professional if you need one.

What I am is a PM who likes accurate data. So that's what Nutrogine is: accurate data, with sources, and zero opinions about whether you should eat the bowl.

How the site works

Right now Nutrogine is a research-aggregation site. Every page pulls from four kinds of sources:

  • USDA FoodData Central — the public-domain government nutrition database (Foundation Foods + FNDDS Survey + SR Legacy).
  • Brand-published nutrition pages — what Chipotle, Cava, Starbucks, etc. publish themselves.
  • User reports — Reddit, Yelp, Lemon8, TikTok. When customers report variance from official numbers, we surface it.
  • News & editorial coverage — when an investigation (CNN, Fortune, Eater) tests something at scale.

The methodology page (/sources) goes into more detail.

What's coming

The site is the first half. The second half is an app — same philosophy, but it works in the moment when you're standing in line at Cava trying to decide what to order. Join the waitlist below and I'll email you when it's ready (target: late 2026).

Find me

I post about building Nutrogine — and PM stuff in general — on Twitter: @AlecZakhary .

Direct email: [email protected] . I read every message — corrections to the data, dish requests, methodology questions all welcome.