What is The Hub’s Food Health Scanner
This app started as a private project, but as it works so well, we decided to make the Food Health Scanner available in The Hub.
My wife has an allergy to Garlic and Mustard. As non-meat eaters, we find both hidden in many veggie and vegan foods. The app scans the bar-code and scores the ingredients for health rating plus warns of allergic ingredients. The user inputs what you are allergic too, and it creates a warning and displays all ingredients, if they are available. Great for us older people always swapping glasses.
It connects to a database API used by leading UK supermarkets. “Aldi” and Lidl can be a bit hit and miss as they tend to update the database slower.
Try it in the live view here. https://foodscanner.affiliatemrrhub.com/
Why Create The Food Health Scanner?
Like a lot of ideas, I created it to solve a problem. I know there are apps available, but I like to create my own solutions. My Wife Jen has a nasty allergy to garlic & mustard. The slightest hint of it makes her heave, which is both awful and hilarious at the same time. The main problem we face is, we are both veggies. Now, we don’t preach it, it’s personal choice and modern advice shows that carnivores are healthier. But, it’s been 32 years and we’re doing fine.
The big problem is, most supermarket food aimed at Veggies or Vegans has garlic / mustard in, maybe to give it some life and flavour. We both wear reading and distance specs, and the constant changing glasses to read labels was a real faff. My idea was to create an app that shows the ingredients. That developed into one that does just that, but also warns of allergies and scores the food for health quality. Therefore, I created the Food Health Scanner web app.
How Does The App Work?
It’s basically a web page, written to work well on mobiles. Save the page to the home screen, which creates an icon. It then opens like a normal app. It reads the bar-code on the product, scans the database and displays the results.
These are,
- Ingredients
- Personalised allergy warnings (based on your initial input)
- Overall food health scores (such as warning you if chocolate contains Palm Oil)
Now, I use this every shopping trip, so, I thought, why not make it available to anyone. It will sometimes say “bar-code” not found. This is usually because the item isn’t on the central database.
If the app becomes popular, I may even wrap it and make it available as a downloadable app.
You can use The Food Health Scanner by visiting this link.
This Web App is free to use. No upsells or adverts. As it’s web based, there is no risk of any downloaded nasties.
For more information about Food Health, please visit NHS Food Labels
