By ELOISE GIBSON

As any New Zealand traveller will tell you, if you walk into a shop in the United States and ask for a coffee, you won’t be served an espresso.

Filter brews – a concoction made by pouring water over ground coffee beans inside a filter and waiting until the liquid drips through – are North Americans’ favourite kind of coffee, whether they are sipping it at a café, service station or somebody’s home.

NTT Communications in Japan has created an iPhone application that estimates the amount of calories in food, reveals Time.com. All the user has to do is point and shoot a picture of the desired item with their phone, which will then be compared to a database of approximately 100,000 foods to tell them how much energy is in it.