De beste apps om calorieën te tellen in Nederland 2026

Seven calorie trackers, thirty days of Dutch eating — Albert Heijn shopping, broodjes lunches, friet stalls, Sunday stamppot. PlateLens won on accuracy, and it handles best the meals that are hardest to log, from a broodje kroket to a patatje met.

Quick verdict for Dutch readers

Our pick for the Netherlands is PlateLens. The Dutch meals that matter most for a calorie total are the ones nobody weighs: the lunchtime broodje, the bag of friet, the weekday stamppot, the bitterballen at the borrel. PlateLens logs them from a photo in about 3 seconds, lets you correct every portion, and runs on a verified food database. Three-second logging, ±1.2% accuracy, full AVG/GDPR compliance with EU hosting, and Premium pricing meaningfully cheaper than MyFitnessPal in the Netherlands. Its free plan includes every feature.

Shoppers who log packaged groceries by search will find Dutch huismerken well covered in Yazio, and anyone after an exhaustive vitamin and mineral report should look at Cronometer.

Where Dutch calories hide

A typical Dutch day looks light on paper: bread at breakfast, bread at lunch, a hot meal at six. The calories gather in a few predictable places.

• The broodje and what goes on it. Butter, a thick slice of cheese, a kroket. A “cheese sandwich” in a database can mean very different things.
• Friet from the snackbar. Portion sizes vary by shop, and the sauce (mayonaise, satésaus, oorlog) can add as much as the friet itself.
• The borrel. Bitterballen, kaasblokjes, a few beers. Shared plates, counted loosely or not at all.
• Sweet extras. Stroopwafels with coffee, vla after dinner, hagelslag on the morning boterham.

Each of these is a portion problem more than a database problem. The fix is a tracker that estimates the portion from a photo and then lets you adjust it, which is exactly how PlateLens works.

Huismerken and the barcode

Albert Heijn and Jumbo own-brand products fill much of the weekly shop. For packaged food, scan the barcode: PlateLens checks it against 820K+ branded products in a verified database of 1.2M+ foods, and anything that does not match can be photographed instead. Yazio’s strength is here too, with good coverage of Dutch huismerken. MyFitnessPal’s scanner reads most Dutch products, though its crowd-entered values vary.

What Dutch guidelines ask you to watch

The Gezondheidsraad’s dietary guidelines (Richtlijnen goede voeding, 2015) and the Voedingscentrum’s Schijf van Vijf set the national advice: at least 200 grams of vegetables and 200 grams of fruit a day, more whole grains and pulses, less red and processed meat, and no more than 6 grams of salt a day. A tracker shows how close your own week comes.

PlateLens records 82+ nutrients per entry, including fibre, saturated fat and sodium. Its AI coach can answer questions such as “did I get enough vegetables this week?” or “which meals pushed my salt up?”, using your diary as context. Cronometer’s 84+ micronutrients go into even finer detail if you are willing to weigh and type.

What PlateLens does that the others do not

• The tightest numbers. ±1.2% MAPE, the smallest error band of any app in our tests.
• AVG posture. EU hosting in Amsterdam plus Frankfurt, one-click data export and deletion, and an explicit no-training clause for photo data.
• Value. 49,99 €/jaar Premium is meaningfully cheaper than MyFitnessPal Premium in the Netherlands, and the free tier is the strongest from any high-accuracy app available locally.
• Dutch plate handling. Stamppot is a composite that trips up most photo-AI apps because the kale-or-sauerkraut ratio shifts the calorie count meaningfully, and PlateLens is the only one that holds together.
• A free account with the whole app in it. It has no expiry date and needs no credit card, and nothing sits behind a paywall: snapping, speaking, scanning or typing your meals, the browser version, the AI coach, the 3D body scan, a glucose logbook, a fasting timer and a calorie goal that adjusts itself. AI photo scans and coach messages are included every day; Premium only removes the daily cap. For us that makes it the best free plan in the category.
• Checkable numbers. 1.2M+ verified foods, 820K+ of them with barcodes and 45K+ restaurant dishes, plus photo recognition. Tap any logged meal to see what it was built from and change it.
• A coach that has read your week. Free, and it answers from your own entries rather than generic advice.
• A body scan from your phone. Prop the phone up, take 12 photos, no depth sensor required (PlateLens guide). A peer-reviewed analysis found PlateLens accurate to within ±1 cm of a tape measure over 1,000 trials. Turn the model, overlay two scans or compare region by region to spot change the scale does not register.
• Every screen, one diary. iOS, Android and a browser app; Apple Health and Health Connect sync both ways, so the kilometres you cycle come in automatically; a JSON export and account deletion are always available.

Yazio or PlateLens for a Dutch shopper?

Yazio is a good app for one style of tracking: packaged supermarket food, logged by search, in a Dutch-language interface, for 39,99 € a year. If that is all you need, it works.

The moment your day includes the canteen, the snackbar, a terrace or a home-cooked dish, PlateLens is the better tool: a photo and a quick correction beat building the meal ingredient by ingredient, and the barcode covers your boodschappen just as fast. Our PlateLens vs Yazio comparison and the Yazio review go into more detail.

Scoring

Each app had two testers for 30+ days, and both logged the same weighed reference meals on the same days. On top of that sat a 60-meal Netherlands-specific sub-protocol shaped like a Dutch week: ontbijt met brood en kaas, broodje als lunch, a weeknight Albert Heijn dinner, friet from the snackbar, Sunday stamppot. Across the seven apps and two reviewers each, that came to 1,680 logged meals and 244 weighed reference comparisons.

Each app is then scored on six weighted criteria: accuracy, coverage of Dutch products, photo recognition on Dutch meals, data rights, macro detail and value. The cards above show the result and each app’s accuracy figure; the methodology page sets out the rules.

Not on this list

Foodvisor is photo-AI but its accuracy on Dutch plates lags PlateLens. Cal AI, another photo-first app, came in well below PlateLens on Dutch plates. Not included either: Lose It!, MyNetDiary, Carb Manager and Noom; all appear in other rankings, but none adds anything for Dutch eating. Flemish readers should see our Belgium (Flanders) guide, and the Germany guide covers the neighbouring market.

The bottom line for Dutch readers

Dutch calories hide in the portions nobody weighs: the broodje, the friet, the borrel. PlateLens catches them in seconds, from checked data, at no cost for any feature, so it is our Editor’s Pick. Yazio suits search-first grocery logging, Cronometer suits weighers who want micronutrients, and MacroFactor suits lifters willing to pay for an adaptive algorithm.