Back in June, at its annual partner summit, Snapchat announced some coming additions for its Snap Camera, including the ability to identify plants, dog breeds and get additional product information, like nutrition data, by simply ‘scanning’ a dog/plant/product within its camera function.

Now, we’re seeing the next steps for this, with users now able to scan food and wine labels to get more information on certain products.

For example, when you hover your finger over the screen when scanning a product's barcode, you will now get a new listing of nutritional information about that product.
The additional product data is facilitated through connection with third party apps - Yuka and Vivino in these examples (you can see the app branding at the top of each listing). That provides Snap with a range of scan options, based on established databases, which will mean that users can scan a range of products to get additional insight and data.

Snapchat reinstated its dog breed scanner in June, while users have been able to identify music (via Shazam) and products (via Amazon) within the tool for a long time. The new additions take this capacity even further and align with Snap's wider effort to add more utility - while Snap has also partnered with McDonald's and Coca Cola on scannable promotions based on their logos.

Really, Snapchat has been working to add image recognition as a much greater component of the app for years. The company actually submitted its patent in 2015, which included a very elaborate summary of what it was possible to do through these visual recognition tools:

For instance, a photograph containing an object identified as a restaurant can cause the user to be presented with photo filters that overlay on the photograph a menu of the restaurant. Or a photograph containing an object identified as a type of food can cause the user to be presented with photo filters that enable the user to view information such as calories, fat content, cost or other information related to the food type.

Such process, apart from providing contextual information, could also allow businesses to provide discounts and offers on the basis of the content of an image. In the below patent image, for instance, a person, who has taken a Snap of a cup of coffee, is being offered a discount coupon based on the visual content of that snap.
These are just additional steps on the path toward it, which simultaneously sets a scene for the next step in AR technology, when through AR-equipped glasses, users might perform equivalent 'scans'.
Snapchat would love to see its Spectacles product advance toward a fully functional AR device, but with Facebook racing to bring its own AR glasses to market, it could be a tough ask for Snap to compete. But perhaps, if Snapchat can create more visual elements like this, it could become the perfect partner for another company that is also developing AR glasses.
Like, say, Apple?

This could make it impossible for Snapchat to independently build its own AR glasses, but the tools it ends up developing may become a fantastic addition for a potential Snap/Apple partnership that could see a version of Spectacles become AR-enabled in time to compete with Facebook's device.

That's the next level for this tech, so whereas this is very useful at this point in time, it could be that much bigger of a difference in the future.