Our Story

Built by someone who actually eats food.

📷

Daniel Kelleghan — Founder, Orelo

"I spent years photographing food for clients — beautiful spreads, carefully lit, styled to make you want to eat everything in the frame. And the whole time, I genuinely had no idea what was in most of what I was shooting."

Not in a dramatic way. I ate reasonably well. I cared about it. But every time I tried to track what I ate, the experience was so joyless — so clinical and tedious — that I'd quit within a week.

Calorie counters treated food like a maths problem. I don't think about food that way, and neither do most people I know. We think about food the way we think about good design: we know quality when we encounter it, even if we can't immediately explain why.

Orelo started as a personal project. I wanted an app that could tell me, quickly and without fuss, whether what I was about to eat was actually good for me. Not a number. Not a judgment. Just clarity.

It turned out that building that required solving some genuinely hard problems — real-time AI food recognition, ingredient safety databases, multi-product shelf scanning. What started as a personal tool became something I thought other people deserved too.

That's still the whole idea. Not an app for people who love tracking. An app for people who want to eat well and get on with their day.

"Most food apps are built on the assumption that people need to be managed. We built Orelo on the assumption that people need to be informed. There's a meaningful difference."

— Daniel Kelleghan, Founder

What We Believe

The principles behind
every decision.

01

Clarity over compliance.

We don't want you to eat differently because an app told you to. We want you to make better choices because you finally understand what you're choosing between. Informed people don't need to be managed.

02

Food is not a maths problem.

Reducing what you eat to calories is like judging a film by its runtime. The number tells you almost nothing useful. Orelo looks at the whole picture: ingredient quality, processing level, additives, and how it fits your actual goals.

03

Your data is yours.

We process your food images on-device where possible, never store your photos, and never sell your health information. This should be the baseline for any health app. We treat it like a promise.

04

Design is not optional.

An app that frustrates you, however accurate, is an app you'll stop using. We care about how Orelo feels to use — the small moments, the transitions, the way a scan result lands. Good design makes good habits easier to form.

05

No guilt.
Ever.

Orelo will never shame you for what you ate, project a negative tone about your choices, or treat a low score as a failure. The app exists to give you information. What you do with it is entirely your business.

06

Built to
last.

Orelo is an independent product. We don't have a business model that depends on selling your data or keeping you anxious enough to keep opening the app. Our business works when you find genuine value — and stay because of it.

The Product

How Orelo came to be.

The first prototype did one thing: point your camera at a meal and get an Oro Score. That was enough to see something interesting was happening.

Friends who tried it kept asking the same question — "can it do this at the supermarket?" That question became the shelf scanning feature, which turned out to be the hardest engineering problem in the whole project, and also the one that makes the biggest difference in practice.

The ingredient intelligence layer came next. Knowing a food scores 62 is useful. Knowing it scores 62 because it contains three E-numbers with limited safety data is more useful. Orelo now explains what's driving any score, down to the specific compounds in the ingredients list.

Beauty and personal care scanning came from a simple observation: the same people who care about what they put in their bodies tend to care about what they put on them. Skincare ingredients get the same treatment as food — scored, flagged, explained.

The result is an app that does something no other health tracker attempts: it reads the world around you and translates it into something you can actually act on. No manual logging. No food databases to search through. Just point, scan, and know.

Join Us

Start knowing what
you actually eat.

Free to download. No credit card. Available now on iOS.

Download Orelo — Free