The Bottom Line
My Food Facts shows a lot of promise, but the database behind the app is not quite robust enough at this point to make it useful on a day-to-day level for people with food allergies. The limited number of allergens that My Food Facts will screen for also limits the usefulness of the app.
Pros
- Scanner function is very fast, and has a cool factor as well.
- Database stores ingredient and nutritional information, as well as allergy alerts.
- Users can save foods to a favorites list in-phone.
Cons
- Only finds information on most common food allergens.
- Information in the saved My Food Facts database may not reflect recent ingredient changes.
- Database does not contain many specialty allergy products.
Description
- Scans barcodes using iPhone camera.
- Links to database of product ingredients and allergy alerts.
- Allows users to personalize by selecting from common food allergies.
Guide Review - My Food Facts: Food Allergy App for iPhone
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 is much quicker than the original version, and the scanner function is as fast as a handheld scanner. 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.
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.
However, food manufactuerers change the ingredients of their products all the time. Information stored in the database that My Food Facts is built around may not be completely up-to-date. That uncertianty meant that I read the product labels after scanning them to reassure myself, which ended up taking more, not less, time.
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.
