SmartChoice — Ingredient Scanner

Now on the App Store

Know what's really in your food, in one tap.

SmartChoice — Ingredient Scanner reads a barcode (or a photo of the ingredient label) and tells you whether the product is approved, not approved, or needs caution — based on the same rules engine that powers the badges on this site.

iOS · Free · No account required

How it works

1 · Scan the barcode

Point your iPhone camera at any UPC. The app looks up the product in our private cache, then USDA FDC, then Open Food Facts (3M+ items).

2 · Or photograph the label

No barcode? Snap the ingredient list. On-device OCR + cloud parsing extracts the ingredients and runs them through the rules engine.

3 · See the verdict instantly

Get a clear "YummyLogy Approved" or "Not Approved" verdict, plus a quality tier — Premium, Good, Standard, or Industrial — and a checklist of what we flagged.

The verdict, at a glance

Every product gets one of four quality tiers, layered on top of the binary approve/reject:

✓ Premium ✓ Good ⚠ Caution ✗ Not Approved

What we check for

  • Artificial flavors & colors (incl. EU-restricted dyes)
  • Refined seed & vegetable oils
  • Artificial sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, etc.)
  • Common preservatives (BHA, BHT, sodium benzoate)
  • Modified food starches
  • Glucose syrup, high-fructose corn syrup
  • FD&C lake dyes
  • Heavy-metal contamination indicators
  • Organic certification status
  • Quality signals (cold pressed, single origin, raw, unfiltered, etc.)
Built on real regulatory data. The rules engine cross-references each ingredient against 17+ regulatory jurisdictions — FDA, EFSA, Health Canada, FSANZ, IARC, and more — so you can see things like "Red 40 requires a warning label in the EU" or "Titanium dioxide is banned in EU/France, permitted in US/UK/Canada". Data sources: Open Food Facts, USDA FoodData Central, plus our own ingredient + quality-attribute rules curated by the YummyLogy editorial team.

Privacy

You don't need an account to scan. Barcodes and label photos you submit help expand our public product database — they aren't tied to your identity. The app stores its API key in iOS Keychain.

Get SmartChoice on your iPhone

Free download, no account required. iOS 17 or later.

Download on the App Store →