The SCIO, the handheld spectrometer that Consumer Physics has produced, first showed up in a Kickstarter video last year, where its creators promised a machine that could tell you “which watermelon is sweeter, when is that avocado going to ripen, how many calories, carbs or proteins are in that shake, how your plants are doing” and more. “Imagine if there was a way to know the chemical makeup of everything you come in contact with,” the narrator says. “The applications are endless.”

The public apparently agreed. The company reached its $200,000 goal within 24 hours. By the end of the month, the campaign raised more than $2.75 million.

More than a year later, the first SCIOs, the ones intended for app developers, are being shipped out this month, to be followed by the consumer version in August or September. I met the CEO, Dror Sharon, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to try it out.

The device itself is the size of a lighter. You hold the SCIO’s camera against the object of your curiosity, pick the appropriate category from the app menu (“fruits and vegetables”, “cheeses”, etc…) and two seconds later the app gives you a simplified nutritional readout.

I unloaded half the contents of my refrigerator onto the table for testing. The crumbly, white mystery cheese I found tucked away behind a cantaloupe on the bottom shelf that morning? 387 calories per hundred grams—very fatty. The apple I bought in the market on my way to campus? 12 percent sugar. The cherry tomato Dror had in his bag? 7 percent carbs. (I didn’t verify these readings with independent lab analysis, but they’re comparable to nutritional data published elsewhere.)

The SCIO analyzed all of my lunch admirably, handling cucumbers, carrots and the rest in quick succession, with one exception. Though it could tell me the chemical make-up of the peel of a lemon I brought, when I shined its Infrared light on the inside of the lemon—on the fruit itself—the device drew a blank. The beam only penetrates a few millimeters, not deep enough to get through the thick rind of something like a lemon so the inside has to be checked separately. The SCIO could recognize and analyze the other foods in my bag because Dror’s team already added similar items to their database. When the SCIO sees a stick of celery, it uses a pattern recognition algorithm to identify the type of vegetable it is and then is able to break down the contents of this specific stick of celery. But the inside of a lemon was nowhere to be found.

According to Ishan Barman, a mechanical engineer and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, the small penetration depth of infrared spectroscopy may prove a serious hurdle for Consumer Physics. “If you are looking at an apple, you might be penetrating 2 millimeters?” he said. “That’s a real problem because an apple is centimeters [thick]. You are only going to be able to analyze the surface or just below the surface, depending on the specimen.”