The author, Brent Schooley, created a tool that allows users to send barcodes of food items via SMS and receive the nutrition information for those items. The tool uses Twilio's MMS service and the Nutritionix API to retrieve the nutrition data. Users can choose to get total nutrition information or compare the nutritional values of multiple items. The tool is built using C# and ASP.NET, and includes features such as error handling and keyword-based processing. The author encourages users to try out the tool and share their creations on Twitter or via email.