Moe’s Southwest Grill

Nutrition Calculator

In early 2012, Focus Brands (now GOTO Foods) hired the company I was working for to redesign their website, modernize their location finder, and support an online ordering system. In the rush to launch the new site, I was asked at the last minute to build a nutrition calculator.

I was handed a spreadsheet of food items with their corresponding calorie counts and a Photoshop file of the design. I used jQuery for client-side interactions and CodeIgniter to render views in response to AJAX requests. I also optimized the design by using image sprites wherever possible, again it was 2012.

One glaring oversight on my part made it into the final site—and since I left the company shortly after launch, no one ever fixed it. When users selected food items in the nutrition calculator, I animated the numbers increasing and decreasing. But I didn’t set an animation duration. Instead of restricting the animation to a set time, every number iterated independently. The result? Large values (like sodium) took forever to finish animating—they just kept going and going. You can still see it on the internet archive.

It was a simple mistake and would have been easy to fix… but maybe it wasn’t all bad. At least it drew attention to just how high those sodium levels really were.