Scallergy is out on iPhone and Android

Scallergy started with a familiar scene: standing in a supermarket aisle, reading a paragraph of six-point ingredient text for the third time, because someone you love reacts to something hiding in it. Milk alone can appear on a label as casein, whey, lactalbumin, or a dozen other names. Nobody should need a chemistry degree to buy cookies.

Today Scallergy is available on both the App Store and Google Play. Free, independent, no ads.

One scan, four honest answers

Tell Scallergy once what you react to — the FDA and EU regulated allergens, plus intolerances like lactose, histamine and caffeine, dietary avoidances like pork/gelatin, alcohol or palm oil, vegetarian and vegan, and over two thousand specific ingredients. Then point the camera at any food barcode. Every scan returns one of four verdicts:

• Avoid — the product lists something on your profile, under any of its label names.
• Caution — a “may contain” or cross-contamination warning matches your profile.
• Looks OK — we found no matches in the ingredient data we have.
• Unknown — we don't have enough data, and we say so instead of guessing.

That last one is the point. An allergen scanner earns trust by admitting what it doesn't know: “Looks OK” always means in the listed ingredients we checked — never a guarantee. The printed label is always the final word.

No barcode? Photograph the label

New in this release: point the camera at the ingredients paragraph itself and Scallergy reads it on your phone — nothing is uploaded. The reader is deliberately strict with itself: if the photo is too blurry or the text doesn't actually look like an ingredient list, it keeps guiding you to a better shot rather than judging text it couldn't read. A wrong “Looks OK” from a bad photo is the one failure an allergy app must never produce.

One scan covers the whole family

Allergies are rarely a solo affair. Keep separate lists for each family member, switch any of them on for a shopping trip, and share a list with grandparents or a babysitter by QR code or link — they can view it in any browser, or add it to their own Scallergy in two taps.

Where the data comes from

Verdicts are built on USDA FoodData Central label data, the crowdsourced Open Food Facts database, and products submitted by the community and verified by us. Because advisory statements like “may contain” are voluntary on US labels and inconsistently present in any single database, Scallergy cross-checks sources to catch them — and tells you the source of what it shows. Details on the data sources page.

Independent, and staying that way

We don't sell products, we don't take money from food brands, and there are no ads. Analytics are deliberately content-free: we never log what's on your allergen profile. The app is free while Scallergy grows with its early community — and every wrong verdict you report via Profile → Contact makes the next family's scan safer.

If Scallergy helps your family shop with less anxiety, a rating on the App Store or Google Play is the best way to help other allergy families find it.