The UNC Dining App for iPhone
Eat UNC · every UNC Chapel Hill dining menu, with the nutrition attached
What the Eat UNC app is
Eat UNC is a free iPhone app for eating at UNC Chapel Hill. It shows the same menus this website shows — Chase and Top of Lenoir day by day, with calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, allergens and dietary flags on every recipe, plus published nutrition for the third-party brands and food trucks around campus. Both read the same database, so nothing appears in one and not the other.
The reason to install it is what a phone can do that a browser tab cannot: remember. The app keeps your favorites, keeps a log of what you actually ate and totals the macros, keeps your ratings, and can tap you on the shoulder when a dish you starred comes back on the menu. If all you want is today's menu, the website already does that and needs no download.
What the app adds over the website
Six things that only work when the menu lives on your own device.
Favorites that stay on your phone
Star the dishes you actually eat. Favorites are stored on the device with Apple’s SwiftData, so they survive relaunches and are yours alone — the website has no equivalent, because a browser tab has nowhere durable to keep them.
A meal log with real macros
Log a serving straight from the menu and the Tracker tab totals calories, protein, fat and carbohydrates for the day. The numbers are the ones UNC published for that recipe, not a lookup from a generic food database, so a Chase entrée logs as that entrée.
Campus brands, not just hall recipes
Chick-fil-A, Bojangles, Bento Sushi, Subway, the Beach Cafe counters and the food trucks can be logged too, using the nutrition each brand publishes. Brand items file under the venue and the meal the clock says, because brands publish no meal periods of their own.
Ratings for the food itself
Rate a dish after you eat it and your rating travels with that recipe wherever it appears — the same recipe number is served at Chase, Top of Lenoir and half the campus counters, so rating it once is enough.
A notification when a favorite is back
Turn on alerts and the app checks upcoming menus in the background and tells you when something you starred is on. These are local notifications scheduled on your own device — there is no push server and no push token.
Top Picks for the meal in front of you
Set a goal — more protein, fewer calories, less fat, fewer carbs — and Top Picks scores the current meal period against it and surfaces the handful of dishes worth walking to. It is the same scoring the website uses, on the screen you already have open.
What it runs on, and what it will not do
The limits, stated up front rather than discovered after installing.
Requirements
- iPhone only — there is no iPad layout and no Android build.
- iOS 17.0 or later.
- Portrait orientation only.
- Free, with no in-app purchases, no subscription and no ads.
- No sign-up: there is no account to create and no email to hand over.
- Needs a network connection to load a menu; menus are not bundled with the app.
Deliberate limitations
- One appearance, and it is light. There is no dark mode. iOS' Increase Contrast setting is supported throughout, with a higher-contrast variant of every brand color.
- Brand items cannot be favorited. Favorites and menu alerts are keyed to UNC recipe numbers, which brand items do not have. You can log and rate a Chick-fil-A sandwich; you cannot get an alert for one.
- It shows what UNC publishes. No prices, no meal-plan balances, no swipe counts. Those belong to UNC's own systems and the app has no access to them.
What the app collects, plainly
Not buried at the bottom of a policy — this is the whole of it.
The app collects anonymous product analytics, and it mirrors your meal log and your ratings to the same database the menus come from. Both are tied to a random identifier generated on your device the first time the app runs. It is not your name, your email, your Apple ID, your phone's advertising identifier or your location — none of those are collected, and there is no account for anything to be attached to.
The analytics record how the app is used — which screens get opened, which filters get set — so that the parts nobody touches can be cut. The meal-log mirror exists so a device failure does not take a term of logged meals with it, and so aggregate ratings can be shown back to everyone. Menu and nutrition data itself is fetched with plain read-only requests that carry no identifier at all.
All of it is off with one switch. The About screen inside the app has a single control that stops the analytics and the mirroring together. Everything else — favorites, filter and sort preferences, the onboarding state — never leaves the phone, and deleting the app deletes it.
The app and the website are the same data
The app is a port of this website rather than a separate product. It reads the same menus, the same nutrition and the same hours, updated by the same nightly job, and its filters are stored under the same names the website uses — so the dietary preferences and avoided allergens you set in one are the ones you would expect in the other. Where the two behave differently, the website is the reference and the app follows it.
Eat UNC is an independent student project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or Carolina Dining Services. Menus and nutrition are published by UNC Dining and change without notice; if you have a food allergy, confirm allergen information at the counter.