A few posts ago we shared here our experience of Yuka, a French-based app supporting consumers in making better choices when picking the right food items to put in their basket in the supermarket and ultimately in their plates.
Returns from many of our French readers were positive: there is clearly an interest in transparency of the food industry, and such apps are helpful to turn consumers into more responsible ones.
After sharing this article on a local forum in Switzerland and inviting readers to share a few words on their habits and on the tools they use to help them make responsible choices, a few came back with CodeCheck as their key reference.
CodeCheck was formed as a company in 2013 in Switzerland and launched as an app in 2014 with the plan to collect and share product data throughout the Geman-speaking countries (Switzerland and Germany).
Nowadays, CodeCheck is the largest product database in Europe with more than 39 million items registered and detailed, and the app, which was originally made in German language only, has now been developed in English, too, to aim at the US market.
What makes CodeCheck such a success?
First, the app does not limit itself to food products: it also includes cosmetics and their components (and knowing the amount of un-necessary chemicals we put on our skin, whether care cream, make-up, shampoos ,or deodorants, such information is more than welcome).
Then, the app allows you to contribute and add any product that would not be registered. One of the readers said the manual registration process was "smooth"and neat: "you copy the ingredients from the label and the system does the evaluation based on those items immediately".
It allows you also to save your own settings relevant to your food habits and your health, for instance it records whether you have certain allergies or not and it will warn you in case a certain products could contain these relevant allergens.
At last, it provides specific "warnings" in case you would like to avoid items that contain too much sugar, palm oil, if you are lactose or gluten intolerant, or if you are vegetarian or vegan. The clearer the signs the easier it gets for you to find the right products.
So for the non-French-speaking / France-based readers, I would advise you to have a look at this app again - available on the App Store for iOS phones.
And to learn more about the company, I invite you to read this interview giving a good idea on the startup's work, vision, background and ambitions.