After reading the book “Ultra Processed People” by Chris van Tulleken I was on a hunt to identify where to find info on what’s Nova 4 or not, and this app made it way easier than I thought would be available. It’s quick to scan and tell you what matches your mandatory categories and even when the product is not in the database, it’s quick to take a pic and have the app transcribe it and categorize it for you! The nutritional information is a bit more manual to enter, so if you’re using the app for that purpose it wouldn’t be as nice of a solution, and some improvements could be made, but for a crowdsourced resource, it’s exceptional.The main downside is I look like a bit of a crazy person scanning everything at the store!

I’m so impressed by the developers who created an open source food database that’s free. It has amazing data in it. However, it needs some polishing. Ceating an account is unnecessarily glitchy. You can’t get an ampersand for the email address because it gives a phone keyboard for the account ID. I found a workaround by using the microphone feature of your phone. Then it gave me a regular keyboard for some reason. Small things like that should be easy to fix. Then I would not hesitate to change my rating from 4 to 5. I guess it might be difficult to test the fix since one only registers once.

OpenFoodFacts is free and community built. Fig makes you pay to scan food products, which as someone who has food allergies I think is ludicrous. OpenFoodFacts has worldwide information and details on more products than Yuka. My only complaint is that the app version for OpenFoodFacts is a bit slow, so I prefer the website version. This app seems really promising and I'm excited to help add to the food database.

The database of foods is much larger than I expected. I knew we consumed more ultra processed foods than we should but some of the foods I thought were healthy were actually ultra processed.This is a great app and look forward to it continued success.

This is a great idea. The problem is that although the scanner recognizes the product (at least generically, but often not the specifics such as the brand) there is no data in the dB for many products. The first four items I scanned all asked ME to enter all the data from the package. Tsk tsk. If you’re crowdsourcing the data it’s going to take a while before this app becomes useful.

I was over the moon when I found the website and am so happy there is something like this. I’ve been searching for something like this website/app for too long. This should be shared everywhere!