Open Food Facts - Product Scan

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.