When you have food allergies, a trip to the grocery store can take hours. Reading every label is time consuming, and if you have multiple family members with multiple allergies, you may feel like you've entered a time warp in the cereal aisle. The new iPhone app My Food Facts™ allows users to scan product barcodes with their in-phone camera and receive instant allergy warnings.
I purchased My Food Facts™ version 1.7 for $9.99 from the Apple AppStore and test-drove it at my local grocery store. Using the "My Allergies" checklist, I identified soy as my allergen.
Version 1.7 has a very quick scanner function. I was able to scan barcodes and look for alerts more quickly than I was able to read the ingredient lists of the products. The program instantly popped up an allergy warning when it found soy in a product.
However, I found that the program was unable to identify many of the products I tried to scan. According to the company, there are "over 100,000" products in its database, yet it could not identify many specialty food items, including food allergy or gluten-free products,. A quick trip down the snack aisle in my local Whole Foods yielded about a 50% recognition rate for the (admittedly nonscientific) selection of products on the middle shelf.
Vistadec, Inc. is addressing this problem by creating an online community forum that allows people to submit names of products they buy that are not in the My Food Facts™ database.
Another nice feature of the app is that, once you have scanned a product, it is saved in a "history" file that allows you to easily access ingredient and allergen information, even if not do not have access to the product's bar code.
This technology contains a lot of promise - not just to make shopping quicker and easier for people with allergies, but to make it safer as well. There is a steep learning curve for reading labels and even after years of practice, I still sometimes miss an ingredient and buy a product I can't eat.
My wish list for My Food Facts 2.0 includes:
A customizable allergen list. Less common allergies like berries, yeast, or corn, are not already separately identified on food labels. The program could be expanded to make it useful for people on other special diets, such as low-salt, diabetic, or low-protein diets.
A searchable database. As someone shopping for a family with multiple food allergies, there are very few prepared foods that I have discovered on my own that my entire family can eat. It would be so helpful if I could search the My Food Facts™ database for all the products that my family can eat and save the list in my iPhone or print it out as a shopping list.
Reading “every label every time” is time consuming, but it is considered to be one of the most important things food allergic consumers should do. Ingredients can change at any time for products that may have previously been “safe”. The food label also often contains additional voluntary allergen warnings like “may contains”.
I am curious what food manufacturers and allergy organizations (like FAAN, AAFA, and KFA) think of this app.
Karen –
You couldn’t be more right about ingredients changing and the need to read every label every time. Thanks for reminding readers of this very important guideline!
Have you read my blog about my experience with forgetting to read a label? It’s titled Warning: May Contain Traces of Grief.”
While I couldn’t find anything about My Food Facts on the FAAN website, it would appear that they are in some way supportive of the program, based on the following statement on the My Food Facts website:
“A new feature will allow shoppers to be alerted to critical food product recalls and food allergy alerts from organizations such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).”
I don’t know – a lot of those recalls and alerts are pretty automatic – just sign up by email and they would probably be easily transferred to the app.
One thing that concerned me was the product’s ability to save info in a “history file”. My concern is that there is a big difference between an app saying “you may be allergic to this product” versus “this product is free of your allergens”.
Reading labels is a pain, and it would be great to have a better way. I’m just a bit skeptical that this product is able to keep up with fast changing ingredients in products.
Thanks for pointing me to your other blog post – I think so many of us can relate to that experience – glad things worked out o.k.
All the best.
This app is a good idea however I feel isn’t going to cut it in the real world.
Those with food allergies and those around them need to take ownership of the situation and responsibility and learn to identify ingredients and the
You can’t rely on a database of possibly outdated info. Things change fast in the manufacturing of food items.
That’s why I made another app called iAllergens. For our family to learn the terms of the allergens that we have to look out for.
Happy to send you a review copy of it if you like.
Aaron
Aaron,
Even learning the names of all the ingredients with a particular allergen may not always be possible. Also, ingredient names sometimes change or new ones are introduced.
For example, look at the WebMD article “Conquering Diabetes” http://blogs.webmd.com/life-with-diabetes-2/2010/09/high-fructose-corn-syrup.html?ecd=wnl_day_092410 where it talks about how the Corn Refiners Association wants to use the term “corn sugar” instead of “high-fructose corn syrup”.