Bitewise
Can I eat this? Any label, any language
Photograph the ingredient list on any packaged food, in any language. Bitewise reads it, translates it ingredient by ingredient into your language, and gives you one verdict per entry in your own dietary profile — with the culprit ingredients named.
Safe
Nothing in your profile is in this list.
Caution
Something ambiguous is — an E-number, “natural flavours”.
Avoid
A named ingredient breaks one of your checks.
Not sure
The list could not be read in full, so it is not “safe”.
The overall verdict is the worst of the individual checks, computed on the server rather than by the model.
Verdicts
One answer per thing you asked it to watch for
You pick the diets and allergies that matter to you — or start from one of five presets: vegan traveller, coeliac, halal, nut allergy, lactose intolerant. Every label is then checked against that list, one entry at a time, and each check expands to its reason.
Absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. If the ingredient list is blurred, cut off or only partly visible, no check may come back safe — it comes back “not sure” and says what is missing.
Culprits
The ingredient that caused it, named
A verdict with no reason is not usable in an aisle. Each check names the ingredients behind it, the EU-14 declared allergens appear as their own row, and the label’s own “may contain” line is quoted rather than summarised.
Mark an allergy severe and a trace warning that names it becomes avoid; one that names nothing at all can never read as safe. A bundled additives table settles the E-numbers whose origin changes an answer — E120 is cochineal every time, E471 depends on the manufacturer every time. It only ever makes a verdict stricter.
Barcodes and text
Three ways in, one kind of answer
The same viewfinder reads EAN-8/13 and UPC-A/E. A barcode hit looks the product up in Open Food Facts and skips the photograph entirely; a miss says so and hands you back to the camera.
No packet to hand? Paste the ingredients as text and get the same verdict from the same endpoint, with the same rules. Your active checks sit across the top of the screen the whole time, so you always know what the next answer is measured against.
Shopping trips
A basket for one shop, tallied as you go
Start a trip and every scan until you finish it is counted together. The tally says how many came back avoid, caution, not sure and safe — so the real question in an aisle, is anything wrong in here, is answered without reopening a single result.
Trips never leave your phone. A scan the phone cannot look up counts as “not sure” rather than quietly dropping out of the basket.
Bitewise is informational. It is not medical advice.
A verdict is not a diagnosis, not a prescription and not a substitute for a doctor, a dietitian or the manufacturer of the food. Bitewise can be wrong: a label can be misprinted or out of date, a recipe can change between batches, a photograph can be blurred or cropped, and the model that reads it can misread it.
If a mistake would be dangerous for you — a severe allergy, a medically required diet — do not rely on Bitewise alone. Read the packaging yourself and check with the manufacturer. You remain responsible for what you eat.
Your dietary profile is health-adjacent information, and we treat it as such: it is attached only to an anonymous device identifier, never to a name, an email address or an account. The privacy policy sets out exactly where it goes.
Get Bitewise
Free to install, with scans included per device. The verdict, the per-diet checks with their reasons and culprits, the declared allergens and the may-contain line are never behind a paywall.