Let Me Scan That

About

© 2026 Gustavo Cadena. All rights reserved. This covers the app's code and design. Product data and photos are from the sources below under their own licences.

Ingredient and product text in the bulk reference comes from the sources below. Community products that people submit in this app are a separate store. They are not part of these databases. Photos that people add in this app are shared publicly as part of the community database.

How is this scored?

The 0–100 score comes only from the ingredients we flag. Every product starts at 100. Each flagged ingredient takes points off by its concern level: High −65, Medium −25, Low −5, Heads-up (info) 0. The score never goes below 0. Because one High-concern ingredient alone takes off 65 points, any product with a High flag scores 35 or less.

Banned ingredients. If an ingredient is banned for this kind of product (food, or cosmetics) in the EU, the UK, the US, or El Salvador / Central America, the product scores Poor (35 at most), whatever the points say, and the reason is shown under the score. A ban somewhere else (for example Canada or one US state) is shown in the ingredient details as “Banned in: …” but does not by itself make the score Poor.

Verdicts: 85–100 Excellent, 65–84 Good, 40–64 Fair, 0–39 Poor. FYI notes (such as fragrance allergens) and heads-up items never lower the score. The score is a simple summary of our flags, not a safety rating, and it does not look at nutrition, dose or how the product is used.

Regulatory sources and Central American labels

Flags cite official sources: US FDA, the European Commission (EUR-Lex) and EFSA, France's ANSES, the UK Food Standards Agency, Health Canada, IARC, California OEHHA and others. Food flags show an “EU:” line with the additive's E-number and status. Findings from the French NutriNet-Santé study (Inserm) are shown as heads-up research findings, not as proof of harm.

Labels from El Salvador and the rest of Central America are in Spanish. Prepackaged food labelling there follows the Central American Technical Regulation RTCA 67.01.07:10, Etiquetado general de los alimentos previamente envasados (general labelling of prepackaged foods), approved by COMIECO Resolution 280-2012. The app recognises common Spanish ingredient names (for example “tartrazina”, “nitrito de sodio”, “dióxido de titanio”). El Salvador also taxes soft drinks, energy drinks and other sweetened drinks (Decreto Legislativo 237, 2009), and since 2017 its schools may not sell foods high in fat, salt or sugar, sugary or artificially sweetened drinks, or sodas and sports drinks (Normativa de Tiendas y Cafetines Escolares Saludables, Acuerdo 15-0733). As of October 2026 El Salvador has no front-of-pack warning-label law, and we have not found a food additive ban specific to El Salvador.

Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts, and Open Products Facts

Data from Open Food Facts (https://world.openfoodfacts.org), Open Beauty Facts (https://world.openbeautyfacts.org), and Open Products Facts (https://world.openproductsfacts.org), made available under the Open Database License v1.0 (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/). Individual contents of each database are available under the Database Contents License (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1-0/). Product images come from the Open Facts projects under CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), with attribution to the project and its contributors.

Ingredient name aliases (Open Beauty Facts ingredients taxonomy)

To recognise other spellings and other-language names of the ingredients we check (for example “Sodium Lauryl Ether Sulphate” or “Coumarine”), the app uses a small alias table (aliases.json) derived from the Open Beauty Facts ingredients taxonomy (taxonomies/beauty/ingredients-cosing-obf.txt, https://world.openbeautyfacts.org), plus a few everyday spellings we added ourselves. It contains information from Open Beauty Facts, made available under the Open Database License v1.0 (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/); the alias table is a derivative database and is shared under the same license.

USDA FoodData Central

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, Branded Foods, release 2026-04-30. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/. CC0 1.0.

Suggested citation: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center. FoodData Central. [Internet]. [cited 2026-10-07]. Available from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/.

NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database

NIH Office of Dietary Supplements Dietary Supplement Label Database. https://dsld.od.nih.gov/. Public domain.

Citation the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements publishes for use when citing the DSLD: US Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD). [Internet]. [cited 2026-10-07]. Available from: https://dsld.od.nih.gov/dsld/.

The DSLD API guide also gives this developer credit line: National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. Dietary Supplement Label Database, 2026. https://dsld.od.nih.gov/. That guide states that DSLD data are in the public domain, are not copyrighted, and are published under CC0 1.0 Universal (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

Share-alike

The bulk database is a derived database. It contains Open Database License data from Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts, and Open Products Facts, together with USDA CC0 rows and NIH public-domain rows. If that database, or a substantial extract of it, is publicly shared, it has to be offered under the Open Database License v1.0 with attribution to those Open Facts projects. A per-product lookup from the API is a Produced Work: it needs attribution (the source, the Open Database License, and a link) and is not itself a database that has to be relicensed. The community store is separate. It holds labels people submitted here. It is not part of the Open Facts databases and this share-alike note does not apply to it.