The top row is six vitamin cards, each labeled with its FDA Daily Value straight off a
nutrition label — Vitamin C at 90 mg, Calcium at 1300 mg, and so on. Tapping a card
swaps every food option and price below it, so switching from Vitamin C to Iron doesn’t
carry over an unrelated food list.

Below that sits a row of food cards for the vitamin you picked, each showing its USDA
amount per portion. You can select up to three at once. Pick just a medium orange for
Vitamin C and the calculator works out you need about 1.3 oranges to hit the full 90 mg
target, landing at roughly $0.64 for the day at the default $0.50-per-orange price —
next to a $0.09 generic supplement dose, that’s a $0.55 gap that grows to about $235 a
year on oranges alone versus $33 on a pill.

Selecting more than one food opens a share slider under each card. Split the same
Vitamin C target 50/30/20 across orange, kiwi, and cooked broccoli and the daily food
cost moves to about $0.77, since kiwi and broccoli each cost more per milligram than a
cheap orange. Every price field next to a food is editable, so if your grocery store
charges more or less than the built-in estimate, the whole comparison recalculates the
moment you change it.

The supplement side has one editable field: the price of a generic daily dose covering
roughly 100% of the Daily Value. It’s not tied to any brand on purpose — move the
slider to match whatever you typically pay.

The results panel lists each food’s portion count and cost, then a side-by-side card
showing food versus supplement across a day, a month, and a year, plus a plain line
stating which one costs more and by how much. A portion count above 6 gets a “large
serving” note, and above 12 it’s flagged as unrealistic on its own — try Calcium
from cooked kale by itself and you’ll see that flag fire immediately, because closing a
1300 mg target takes about 13.8 cups of kale, near $12.45 a day, against $0.12 for a
supplement dose of the same nutrient.

Underneath, a ranked list shows every food option for the selected vitamin by cost to
cover 100% of the Daily Value alone, cheapest first, with a “Cheapest” tag on the top
result — for Vitamin C that’s red bell pepper at about $0.57, just ahead of the
orange at $0.64.