About us
Ingredient.help reads the labels on food, cosmetics and pet food and tells you, in plain words, what they show. No ads, no brand deals, and the only people we work for are the ones who use it.
No advertising.
We don't run advertising of any kind: no ads, no ad trackers, no third-party analytics, nothing promoted. No one can pay for a place in search results, or anywhere else in the app.
No link in the app earns us anything. The links that leave it go to the sources behind what we show: recall notices, regulations, veterinary and scientific references, makers' own pages, and the open databases we credit.
No brand partnerships.
We don't partner with brands. No brand pays us, sponsors a page or has a deal with us, and no brand can pay to change a score. A score is only worth reading if no maker can buy a say in it.
Some product data comes from published label data: what makers and retailers publish online, and the label data the food industry supplies to the USDA's public FoodData Central database. We take it as published, say so on the product, and no maker has a say in how we read it.
Our only support is you.
The only money we take comes from the people who use Ingredient.help. The plan is an optional subscription, Ingredient Plus. Checkout isn't live yet, so for now nobody pays anything.
The recall, allergen, sensitivity and pet-hazard checks are never locked behind a plan. You can scan without an account, and the household diary is free on every plan.
You already help in another way, too: one clear photo of a label nobody has read yet opens that product for everyone who scans it after you.
Independent, and made for people.
No brand, advertiser or sponsor has a say in how we read a label or score it. We work for the person holding the pack: a shopper at the shelf, a parent checking labels against the list they keep for their family, an owner filling a pet's bowl.
Scan a barcode, photograph a label or search by name. Food labels we can read are checked against the allergens and sensitivities you've set, pet food against the hazards we hold for cats and dogs, and cosmetics against a list of ingredients some people prefer to know about. When we can't read a label well, the app says so instead of answering these checks.
Our reading, not the final word.
We say what a label shows and what it doesn't, not whether a maker's claim is true: a maker may hold evidence a label does not print. Each product says where its data came from whenever we know it: our own reading of the pack, a shopper's reading, published label data, or an open database such as Open Food Facts.
For food and cosmetics, the product report is written by Claude, an AI model from Anthropic. When it writes the report, it isn't told the brand or the product name. It rates five parts of the label against a fixed rubric and is asked to name the reason for every point it takes off; it never sets the overall number. Our server adds the points up, and the full report shows the sum step by step.
For pet food, our server works out the whole report, the score and every sentence of it, by fixed rules from the ingredient list and the analysis panel; no AI writes it. An AI model is asked only what an ingredient line we don't know yet is, without the brand or the product name, and the report says when it was. What we hold about the maker is shown beside the score, with its sources, and is not part of it.
If the score of a product with a barcode looks wrong, tap "This score doesn't look right" under its breakdown. It doesn't change the score; it goes to a review queue we read, where several people disagreeing about the same kind of product is how we find a rule that's wrong.
What leaves this device.
Who you keep the diary for, what they had and how they were stays in this browser. From the diary, a product you confirm or are the first to read is kept with your account if you're signed in, never who had it or how they were.
If you're signed in, the products you scan, the ingredient pages you open and the combinations and prices you save are kept with your account. You can download all of it, or delete the account, from Profile.
Looking a barcode up asks our server about the product. Label photos are sent through our server to be read, by Google Cloud Vision or by Claude, depending on the photo, and when a new score is written from your label, the label text goes to Claude. Each label we read also sends our server a note of which ingredients we did and didn't recognise, with no photo and no account or identity attached.
Ingredient.help is an educational tool, not medical, dietary or veterinary advice.