Development and validation of an electronic application (FoodEapp) to assess the dietary intake of adults in Karachi, Pakistan

•We developed and validated the interviewer-administered dietary data collection application to be used by unskilled field staff with no formal nutrition education.•For electronic application development, we conducted a Portion Survey (PS), constructed the Food Atlas (FA), generated the Generic Recipes and constructed the Food Composition Database (FCDB).•For the validation study, we took a sample size of 363 adults (182 in urban and 181 in rural arm) from our urban and rural sites in Karachi, Pakistan.•This validation study took place in a community setting over the course of 12 months.•We validated the FoodEapp against the conventional nutritionist-administered 24HR Dietary Recall tool.•We developed an FA with 48 pictures of raw, 152 cooked mixed dishes with three different portion sizes, and 150 pictures of commercially prepared food items.•We computed the nutrient values of 319 mixed dishes and 80 commercially prepared, ready-to-eat food items.•We found a high correlation between FoodEapp and conventional 24HR recall for total energy, protein, total lipids, carbohydrates, iron and vitamin C.