Why it matters to you
Keeping track of your calories consumed can be hard work, but Sweetgreen wants to make it easier with this new Apple Health integration.
If you’re counting calories these days (as so many of us are), chances are most of those calories are coming from salad. And if you’re eating a lot of salad, chances are you’re taking many a trip to Sweetgreen, the restaurant chain that has somehow managed to make vegetables go mainstream. And now, Sweetgreen’s app will let you track your intake more easily than ever by allowing you to apply calorie counts to your Apple Health data anytime you place an order through the app.
While a number of companies allow you to order via mobile (Starbucks lets you skip the line this way, too), it would appear that Sweetgreen’s connection to Apple Health is the first of its kind. The latest version of the Sweetgreen app comes with an “Add to Health” button in its interface. Once you’ve placed your order, you can decide whether or not to include some or all of the items in your cart to the Health app.
This could certainly be a useful function for calorie-conscious folks who would otherwise have to manually log this information in another app. But having Sweetgreen do it for you essentially cuts out any additional steps in between, making living a healthier lifestyle all the more convenient. This is also particularly useful for Health app users as Apple’s app still doesn’t have a central database of foods, which means that if you want to enter the number of calories consumed in a meal, you have to already know what that count is. You are unable (as of yet) to simply add that you ate a serving of lettuce and a quarter cup of tofu — Health won’t know what to do with that information.
This is by no means the first time that Sweetgreen has shown itself to be quite forward-thinking. Last year, the restaurant chain announced that in 2017, it would be going cashless, becoming one of the few fast food chains to insist upon either credit cards or mobile payment options. So if you’re planning on salad for dinner tonight, make sure you’ve got some plastic in your wallet and are placing your order through the Sweetgreen app.