How to Read Your BiteBetter Scorecard: Every Section Explained

When you paste a DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub receipt into BiteBetter, the scorecard it generates has seven distinct sections — each answering a different question about what the meal actually delivered. This guide walks through every section, in the order it appears on the modal that opens when you click into a saved order on your dashboard, so you know what each number, bar, and chip represents.

If you've never used BiteBetter before and want a broader overview of why the scorecard exists, see our breakdown of what your delivery orders actually say about your nutrition. This article assumes you already have a scored order in front of you and want a section-by-section reference.

The Header: Grade, Score, Restaurant, Date, and Summary Chips

At the top of the scorecard modal is the header — the green banner with the order's overall summary. It contains four pieces of information, all in a single row:

• The grade circle (left side). A circular badge with a letter grade — A, A-, B+, B, C+, C, D, or F — and the numeric score underneath. Possible scores run 0–100. Color-codes follow the grade: deep green for A, lighter green for B, yellow for C, orange for D, red for F.
• The restaurant name and platform. Shown as the order title on the right. The platform (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) and the order date appear in lighter text immediately below.
• The summary chips row. Four small chips below the title. They report: how many items the scorecard analyzed (e.g., "3 items"), the total calories for the order (e.g., "1,090"), how many nutritional gaps the order has ("2 gaps"), and how many excesses ("1 excess"). Orders with no gaps show fewer chips — the gaps chip only appears when there's at least one gap. Same for excesses.

The Items Ordered List

The first card below the header is Items Ordered — a list of every item the receipt parser identified in your order, with the parsed name on the left and the per-item calorie count on the right. This is what BiteBetter used to calculate the order's nutrition profile.

The items list matters for three reasons:

• It tells you which items were successfully parsed. If the parser missed an item or matched it incorrectly, the item name here will look wrong. You can re-paste with corrections, and the scorecard will rebuild.
• It anchors the calorie count. Per-item calories are summed into the total calories shown in the summary chip. If the per-item list looks wrong, the total will be wrong.
• It's the source for per-item recommendations. When the scorecard flags a gap or excess at the order level, the items list is where the weight is concentrated — a 1,400-calorie burrito bowl is a different lever than eight 175-calorie appetizers, even if calorie totals match.

The Nutritional Gaps Card

The second card is Nutritional Gaps — the section that drives most of the value you'll get from BiteBetter. Each row in this card is a single nutrient where your order delivered less than 50% of the DRI target you've set for yourself.

For each gap nutrient, the card shows the nutrient name on the left and the percentage of daily reference intake delivered on the right (e.g., "12% of DRI"). Nutrients that don't appear weren't meaningfully deficient in the order. Nutrients that do appear are where the meal fell short.

The gaps card is where the scorecard's gap framing (versus excess-focus) pays off — see our broader analysis of how delivery nutrition gaps actually show up in your order history. If you're seeing vitamin D in your gaps nearly every order, that's a structural pattern worth addressing at the diet level — not by tweaking single orders.

The Over Limits Card

Directly beside (or below on narrow screens) the Nutritional Gaps card is Over Limits — the mirror-image section. Each row here is a nutrient where your order exceeded the safe or recommended upper threshold. Like the gaps card, each row shows the nutrient name on the left and a percentage on the right; for excesses, the percentage is "% of limit" rather than "% of DRI" to avoid confusion.

The Over Limits card populates when the order delivered:

• Sodium in excess of the daily ceiling. The default ceiling is the CDC/AHA 2,300mg/day. An order with 2,500mg sodium will appear here at 108% of limit.
• Saturated fat above the AHA recommended ceiling. Roughly 13g/day for adults; order-level thresholds convert the per-meal contribution to this daily budget.
• Added sugar above the AHA recommendation. Roughly 25g/day for women, 36g/day for men — the rendering uses the gender-default ceiling configured at signup.
• Calories exceeding the per-day target. Order-level totals over 100% of the configured daily-cal target appear here. (Most single meals don't trigger this; multi-thousand-calorie orders can.)

A clean order with no gaps and no excesses will show only "No significant gaps" and "Nothing over the safe limit" placeholder text in these cards. The denominator-zero case (no data) shows a "No detailed scorecard available" placeholder instead — that typically means receipt parsing failed to identify the items. See our piece on how calorie tracking apps miss delivery food for background on why some receipts don't parse cleanly.

The Macronutrients & Energy Section

Below the gaps and excesses cards, the scorecard renders a section titled Macronutrients & Energy. This is where every macro nutrient in the order appears as a horizontal bar, with the percent of DRI for that nutrient shown at the right edge of the bar.

The macros section of the scorecard shows three nutrients, in this fixed order:

1. Calories — with the per-meal calorie total mapped to the daily 2,000-kcal reference (so the bar shows approximately the day's percentage the meal represents).
2. Protein — grams of protein in the order, mapped to the 50g/day RDA for adults.
3. Fiber — grams of fiber in the order, mapped to the 28g/day Daily Value target.

The bar color encodes the status: green for "optimal" (within or above the target range without going excessive), yellow for "adequate" or "low" (under target but functional), red for "deficient" (well below target) or "excessive" (well above). The percentage at the right edge shows the numeric DRI-percentage; if the order delivered over 100%, the bar fills the full track and the status determines whether it's flagged as excessive.

The Minerals Section

The next section is Minerals, which renders the order's contribution to the three minerals tracked in the scorecard: sodium, iron, and calcium. Each mineral is shown as a bar with the same color-coding logic as the macros section.

• Sodium — mapped to the 2,300mg/day CDC target. Order-level sodium often exceeds 100% of the daily limit, which trips the status into the orange/red "high" or "excessive" range. When this happens, the bar fills completely and the bee-striped "overflow" indicator on the right side signals it.
• Iron — mapped to the 18mg/day RDA for adult women, 8mg/day for adult men (the scorecard uses the gender configured at signup). Most delivery meals under-deliver iron, which is why you'll see iron appear frequently in the gap list.
• Calcium — mapped to the 1,000mg/day RDA for most adults. Burrito bowls and salads do better here; pizza and burger-only meals often fall short.

The Vitamins Section

The final nutrient section is Vitamins, which renders the order's contribution to: vitamin C, vitamin D, and folate. Same color-coding and bar format as the other sections.

• Vitamin C — mapped to the 90mg/day RDA for adults. Citrus, peppers, and most salads deliver meaningful amounts; burger-and-fries meals often deliver close to zero.
• Vitamin D — mapped to the 600–800 IU/day RDA. This is by far the most consistently deficient nutrient across delivery orders — the scorecard will show it in the Deficient range on the vast majority of single meals.
• Folate — mapped to the 400mcg/day RDA. Greens, beans, and avocado deliver meaningful amounts; most complete-meal-format orders fall short.

That structural pattern matters: vitamin D simply doesn't appear in most cuisine categories except fortified dairy and certain fish. Pairing your delivery meal with a vitamin-D-source side (a Greek yogurt, a salmon order, an egg dish) is a structural fix that the scorecard will surface across multiple orders. For practical swaps, see how to get more protein and micronutrients from delivery.

How the Bar Status Colors Map to Labels

The status shows up as a class on the nutrient row (e.g., status-optimal, status-low, status-deficient, status-high, status-excessive). Each maps to a color and a meaning:

The "High" status (yellow) is distinct from "Excessive" (red) by intent: "High" means the order pushed close to or above the recommended ceiling but stayed under the level associated with health risk. "Excessive" means the order crossed into the range where the order alone has overshot the day's tolerance. Sodium is the nutrient most often split between these two.

How to Use the Scorecard in Practice

Three practical workflows for using the scorecard:

1. After a single order: Open the scorecard, scan the gap and excess chips, then read the macro and mineral bars to understand what the meal did and didn't deliver. If you see a 0%–25% vitamin D gap or a 200%+ sodium excess, the data is telling you something concrete about that meal.
2. At week's end: Open your dashboard and look at the rolling 7-day average score. Compare it against the trailing 30-day. The trend tells you whether the order-level patterns you've been running are making aggregate progress or not.
3. When evaluating a new restaurant or cuisine: Score 3–5 orders from it before assuming you know its pattern. A single chipotle bowl being high in fiber doesn't mean all chipotle orders will be; a single pizza being high in sodium doesn't mean all pizzas will be. The dashboard's average-DRI-score and the per-order scorecards together give you the right level of granularity.

For the broader framework of what to do when the data surfaces a pattern, see how to score any restaurant menu before you order — which uses the same DRI math applied predictively to a menu before you place the order, rather than reactively after you've eaten it.

Putting It All Together

The scorecard's seven sections answer seven questions:

1. The header tells you this order's overall grade and how many gaps and excesses it has.
2. The items list tells you what was actually in the order.
3. The gaps card tells you which nutrients the order fell short on.
4. The excesses card tells you which nutrients the order overshot.
5. The macros section gives you the DRI-percentage bars for calories, protein, and fiber.
6. The minerals section gives you the bars for sodium, iron, and calcium.
7. The vitamins section gives you the bars for vitamin C, vitamin D, and folate.

Read together, those seven sections let you answer the question that the FDA menu labeling rule and the delivery app's own calorie count structurally cannot: did this meal move my day's nutrition forward, backward, or sideways, and which nutrients told the story? That's the gap the BiteBetter scorecard closes.