What's really
in that product?

IngredientInfoBuddy scans a food or drink product and surfaces what's genuinely worth knowing about its ingredients — not an exhaustive list of trivia.

Red, yellow, green

Every flag is colored so you can tell how serious it is at a glance, not just that it exists:

• Red — high concern. A real food-safety regulator found something specific: an outright ban or revoked authorization (FDA, EU, California), an EFSA finding that some age groups exceed the safe intake level, or a mandatory EU warning label.
• Yellow — worth noting. A milder or more provisional flag: a moderate EFSA finding, an ANSES "warrants further review" listing, an allergen (relevant if it applies to you), or ultra-processed (NOVA group 4).
• Green — good sign. Nothing was flagged, or the product is NOVA group 1 (unprocessed/minimally processed).

Important: yellow doesn't mean "safe" and red doesn't mean "avoid this." It's a severity signal for how strong the underlying finding is, not a verdict on whether you personally should eat it — that depends on things this app doesn't know, like how much of it you eat and your own health situation.

What we flag, and why

• Allergens — always shown when declared. Yellow, not red: an allergen isn't dangerous to everyone, only to people allergic to it.
• Ultra-processed (NOVA group 4) — a food-processing classification, shown as context. Yellow, not red: NOVA is legitimate but genuinely contested in the research (a 2025 Harvard cohort study found the processing tier alone predicts less than assumed), and it isn't a regulatory finding the way an EFSA risk evaluation is.
• Additives — flagged only when a real regulator has said something about them: a ban or revoked authorization, an EFSA overexposure-risk finding, an ANSES additive-of-interest listing, or (for six specific dyes) a mandatory EU child-attention warning label. Additives with no such flag aren't shown — no flag isn't "safe," it just means we found no specific regulatory concern to report. Where EFSA has published a follow-up that supersedes an older finding (e.g. sorbic acid, re-assessed in 2019), we show the current position, not the outdated one.
• Banned or ban-scheduled additives — red, each citing the primary source: the FDA's revocations of Red 3 (2025) and brominated vegetable oil (2024), the EU's 2022 titanium dioxide ban, and the California Food Safety Act (effective 2027).
• Artificial (non-sugar) sweeteners — a yellow note, citing the WHO's 2023 guideline advising against using them for weight control (no long-term benefit; possible long-term metabolic risks).
• Nutrition at a glance — high/moderate/low levels of fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt per 100g against the UK Food Standards Agency's front-of-pack criteria, plus the product's Nutri-Score (A–E, from France's public-health agency) when available. "High" here means it crosses the regulator's per-100g threshold — it's context, not a safety verdict.
• Nutrition score (0–100) — this is not a rating we invented. It is the official Nutri-Score, developed by France's public health agency from a peer-reviewed nutrient profiling model, simply rescaled from its A–E letter to a 0–100 number so you can compare two similar products. It rates nutrition only — calories, saturated fat, sugar and salt count against a product; fibre, protein and fruit/veg/nuts count for it. Ingredient and additive flags are deliberately kept separate, because "is this nutritious?" and "has a regulator flagged an ingredient?" are different questions, and blending them into one number would invent a precision that doesn't exist.
• Good signs, held to the same standard — positives aren't sugarcoating; they use regulators' own bars. "High fiber" / "high protein" chips appear only when the product meets the EU's legal thresholds for printing those claims (Regulation 1924/2006). "No additives detected" appears only when the full ingredient list is on file and contains zero additives.
• Healthier picks — when a product scores Nutri-Score C–E, we look for products in its own Open Food Facts category (creamy peanut butters match creamy peanut butters) with a strictly better Nutri-Score and none of this app's red flags. They're the best-rated matches in the database — not a guarantee of what's on your local shelf.

What we deliberately don't do

We don't claim that specific ingredient combinations are dangerous. Outside one narrow, well-documented case (the EU's mandatory warning on six food dyes), there's no reputable source backing general "these ingredients together are risky" claims for food — so we don't make them.

Data sources

Product and ingredient data from Open Food Facts (ODbL). Additive risk flags from Open Food Facts' EFSA/ANSES-sourced additive taxonomy. Not all US products are in the database yet.

Not medical advice

This app provides general information for informational purposes only. It is not medical, dietary, or health advice. Talk to a doctor or registered dietitian about your specific situation, especially for allergies.

Photo credits

Hero image: AI-generated with FLUX.1-schnell (Apache-2.0). It is an illustration — not a photograph, and not a real scientist or a real laboratory. Grocery shelf photo: Philrj / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).