Food & drink
Scan a food label.
One photo of the ingredients panel, one number back, and the effects behind it.
Coming first to Android.
A food panel is printed heaviest first, so where a name sits on the list tells you as much as the name does. It is also the format that lets a manufacturer build a product on a carbohydrate that behaves like sugar without ever printing the word “sugar” on the panel. UnPeel reads the list as printed, accounts for every ingredient it can identify, and names the ones it could not place rather than passing over them. The score is calculated the same way for every label, which is what makes two products comparable at all.
On the label
Maltodextrin
What it actually is
Starch, broken down until it behaves like sugar
It is a carbohydrate but not a “sugar” on the nutrition panel, so a product can be built on it and still look low in sugar.
What the app shows
Raises blood sugar
Rapidly digested glucose polymer
- 01
Photograph
Point at the ingredients panel. Your phone reads it on-device.
- 02
Decode
Every ingredient matched, and judged in the right context for that kind of product.
- 03
Score
One number, 0–10 — and the effects behind it.
What can I scan — and does it really work on non-food?
Anything with an ingredients panel: food, skincare, supplements, pet food and household products. You never pick a category — the app works out what it is looking at, and a serum, a bag of kibble and a bottle of bleach each get an analysis written for that kind of product, rather than a food analysis awkwardly reused.
Why did a scan take longer, and what happens to an ingredient you don’t recognise?
Both come down to the shared index. A label already in it is replayed instantly. A brand-new one gets the full read, including researching any ingredient our reference table has never seen: classified during the scan, written into the table, and the score recalculated on the fuller evidence. If that research cannot finish in time, the ingredient contributes nothing rather than being invented, and your coverage figure says so. The first person to scan something waits a few seconds longer; everyone after them does not.
What happens to the things I scan?
Your photo, the text read from it and the analysis stay on your account, in your history, until you delete the scan or the account. What is shared is the product, never the person: the ingredient profiles your scan taught us, and the product itself in the rankings. The rankings show products, not people.
Coming first to Android.
No public date yet. One free scan a week, and the same analysis for everyone.
Coming first to Android.