Best Portable Food Scales for Travel

One of the most challenging parts of traveling is often sticking to our diet, fitness and nutrition plans and making sure they don’t go straight out the window on day one. Either we’re too busy enjoying ourselves or we don’t have access to the same equipment or maybe it’s just too much work to do what we normally do. When we get back home, it feels like we have to start all over again, which gets frustrating!

One of the most common problems while eating on the road is that portion sizes at restaurants are so much bigger than normal. Or, if you keep track of your macros and micros for bodybuilding or dieting, it’s hard to know what’s in what you’re eating when it’s not food you prepared yourself.

Luckily, both of these problems can be solved using portable food scale. Whether you use a scale in your daily life or not, using one while traveling can make it so much easier to stick to your usual routine, from portion control to calculating nutritional and macro information. 

We’ve compiled the best seven portable food scales for travel, taking weight, accuracy, easiness to clean and size into consideration. Any of these scales can help you keep up with your goals during business trips, vacations, or even short weekend getaways. Say goodbye to starting over and get ready for a more consistent life!

The 7 Best Portable Food Scales for Travel


Our overall favorite scale is the Mackie NutraTrack Mini digital kitchen scale. This scale is the traveling bodybuilder’s dream, serving as an all-in-one food scale and calorie and macro counter.

We love how multi purpose this scale is. It comes with 999 foods preprogrammed into its nutritional database and allows 999 more foods to be custom added. Codes for the most common 160 foods are printed under the glass on the surface of the scale for quick reference. Weigh the food you have, enter its code and you immediately have that food’s nutritional breakdown displayed on a large, brightly backlit screen. This includes the weight of the food and its calorie, carbohydrate, fate, sodium, protein, cholesterol and fiber content.

The top of the NutraTrack Mini scale is thick tempered glass designed to be anti-microbial and shatterproof. The buttons are touch sensitive, keeping the design smooth and easy to clean. It includes a tare function to reset the scale and a power button although it does have an Auto Off function to save power. This scale is only 1.3 pounds but can weigh up to 11 pounds and is approximately six by nine inches, making it perfect for packing.

Overall, this scale does what you expect it to and more. It’s tough, versatile and well-designed for those who love nutrition as much as they do traveling. With Mackie Scientific’s five year full free replacement warranty, it’s hard to go wrong.

Our next favorite portable scale is the Ellessi Food Weight Scale. This handy, battery-free scale is perfect for covering all your basic food weighing needs no matter where you are in the world.

One really unique feature that we love about this scale is that it is self-charging. There is a small knob on top that, when turned, charges the scale for four minutes. This makes it an excellent scale for traveling anywhere where traditional batteries may be difficult to find or to countries with different outlet voltage, since most scales use batteries or plug in. This feature also helps save you money and protect the environment, since batteries can be costly and hard on the planet.

This scale features two buttons: the tare button to reset the scale and a unit button on the bottom to change between ounces to grams and liquid ounces to milliliters. It can support up to 11 pounds and reads accurately as low as 0.10 ounce.

If you love having chic, minimal products, this is a great scale for you. Its body is gray stainless steel with anti fingerprint technology, giving it a constant “just out of the box” look. The stainless steel is easy to sanitize and tough enough to handle being thrown in a checked bag or tossed in an overhead compartment.

Weighing in at only 1.3 pounds and about the size of a tablet, the Ellessi scale is easy to carry in a suitcase or backpack without taking up precious packing space. Its self charging feature and aesthetically pleasing design make it an all around great travel scale.

The Greater Goods Nourish digital food scale is a sleek dual-purpose scale that weighs food and shows its nutritional facts in an easy-to-read chart.

This scale is built with four precision weighing sensors, ensuring all food is measured accurately within 0.1 ounce or one gram. The silver surface is smooth, tempered glass that supports up to 11 pounds or five kg. Buttons are touch-sensitive and include a zero function to reset the scale or measure food in a bowl and a button to quickly switch between pounds and ounces or grams. The scale is supported by non-slip, scratch-resistant feet for no-worry weighing. It runs on three AAA batteries that are included with your purchase and has an auto off function after one minute of no use.

One great feature with this scale is that Greater Goods has an app, Nourish Perfect Portions, for the nutrition codes, available in both the iTunes and Google Play stores. This app makes it easy to look up any food codetype in the code using the keypad on the scale and quickly get the nutritional information for the food based its weight. The scale has 2,000 codes built into its database and has the ability to custom create up to 99 more entries using the app.

Just under two pounds, the Greater Goods Nourish scale is an excellent choice if you want to keep track of more than just your portion sizes while traveling.

Our second Mackie Scientific scale on this list is the Mackie NutraTrack C19 digital scale. This  is a beautiful, lightweight scale, perfect for easily keeping track of calories while on the road.

The number of calories per ounce of the most common 160 foods are printed on the scale beneath tempered, shatter-proof glass. With quad sensor technology, the NutraTrack C19 weighs your food to an accuracy of 0.04 ounces or one gram. Then you can use the calorie reference guide to quickly calculate the number of calories in your meal.

This scale is also one of the most lightweight scales on the market, weighing just 15.2 ounces, making it a little lighter than the Mackie NutraTrack Mini. The C19 is only 7.8 by 5.8 inches but can accurately weigh up to 12 pounds. It has an easy-to-read screen with simple on/off/zero and unit buttons.

One thing that we love about the NutraTrack C19 is that Mackie Scientific’s business ethics are as high quality as their products. They responsibly source their materials and build their products in factories that do not harm the environment as well as donating a portion of their profits to help save honey bees. As travellers, it’s so important to help save the world we love to see.

Overall, the NutraTrack C19 is a lightweight scale with excellent accuracy. It’s a no-nonsense scale that does exactly what you need it for. This is a great scale that will earn a permanent place in your travel bag!

Another Greater Goods scale has made our list but the 480 Di digital scale is so sleek and lightweight that we couldn’t pass it up. It’s a basic scale that’s straightforward and easy to use.

At only 5.6 ounces, this scale is the lightest on our list. However, it can still weigh up to 11 pounds within 0.1 ounce or one gram accuracy. It includes two CR2 batteries that are included with the scale. It has two touch sensitive buttons, one for power and a zero function and the other to change the unit of measurement.

The body of this scale is a smooth light gray plastic that’s easy to keep clean and hygienic. Its screen is a high-contrast LCD screen with large, easy-to-read numbers. One downside to this scale is that it does not measure decimal points, but if you just want a simple scale to keep track of general portion sizes, whole numbers are ok.

This scale does exactly what you need a scale to do: weigh your food quickly and without extra fuss. A minimalist or chronic over-packer’s dream, the lightweight, slim Greater Goods 480 Di is the perfect food scale to bring on any trip.

The Letton Digital Kitchen Scale is a simple, modern scale perfect for everyday and travel use. It only weighs 15.2 ounces and has touch sensitive buttons, making it a smooth, lightweight product easy to bring along on vacation or business trips.

The Letton scale has a stainless steel top which is easy to wipe clean, no matter where you are. It also runs on 3 AAA batteries, which are included with the scale. Its LED display screen has a battery life indicator that flashes when the batteries are nearly dead, so you know if you need to replace them before your trip. The LED display also makes reading the weights easy in any environment.

This scale is accurate to 0.035 ounces or one gram and has a button to immediately switch between weighing modes: pounds and ounces to grams and fluid ounces to milliliters. The scale also has a tare button to reset the scale if you want to weigh anything in a container. One handy feature of this scale is that it can handle nearly twice the average weight of the other similar scales, reaching up to 22 pounds or 10 kilograms. There is an auto shutoff feature in case you overload the scale.

Overall, the Letton scale is a study scale that will accurately weigh anything you toss its way. However, it’s still small and light enough that it’s easy to bring along for all your travels!

Last but by no means least, EatSmart makes a professional grade scale for the traveller who needs absolute accuracy but still wants a scale that is small and light enough to pack in a carry on. The EatSmart Precision Elite digital scale ensures that no matter your dietary needs, your measurements will be perfect.

This EatSmart scale can weigh up to 15 pounds in 0.05 ounces or one gram increments. It runs off of four AAA batteries, which are included, and has an auto shut off after three minutes to preserve battery life. The screen is backlit for easy reading in any conditions. The scale itself is made from stainless steel which is easy to wipe down and sanitize after use.

We love that this scale comes with a free EatSmart Calorie Factors guide to help make portion control and calorie counting easy. You can use this to keep track of your daily intake whether you are at a restaurant or making food in a hotel kitchen.

One downside to this scale is that it is a little heavier than the other scales on this list. However, for a professional grade scale, it’s about as light as possible. Plus, the weight is worth knowing that your measurements are accurate to three decimal places.

Overall, the EatSmart Precision Elite scale is an excellent choice for travellers who have very strict dietary requirements or just want the most accurate scale possible for the smallest size. If this is you, this scale will become the thing you don’t want to leave home without!


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We’ve compiled the best seven portable food scales for travel, taking weight, accuracy, easiness to clean and size into consideration. #travel #food #foodscales #dieting #travelfood #traveldiet #healthy #healthyfood #organic #kitchentools
We’ve compiled the best seven portable food scales for travel, taking weight, accuracy, easiness to clean and size into consideration. #travel #food #foodscales #dieting #travelfood #traveldiet #healthy #healthyfood #organic #kitchentools

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