Food label scanner
Point your camera at the printed ingredient panel and FoodBuddy reads it on the spot — no typing, no searching, and it keeps working even with no signal in the store.
How the scan works
The label scanner uses on-device text recognition (OCR) to read the ingredient panel you frame in the camera. Recognition happens on your phone, not a server, which is why it keeps working in a basement supermarket with zero bars. As soon as text is detected, the recognized ingredients are compared against your profile and the matches are highlighted with the reason for each.
Getting a clean read
Small, curved, glossy print is the hard case for any OCR system, FoodBuddy included. A few habits help: flatten the label as much as the packaging allows, keep the panel filling the frame, and make sure there’s enough light — a phone flashlight works fine on foil or dark plastic. If a character is misread, the result shown still links back to the exact recognized text, so you can catch it and re-scan rather than trust a bad read silently.
Open the scanner and frame the printed ingredient list — not the front-of-pack marketing copy.
Hold steady for a moment while the text is recognized on-device.
Review the highlighted matches against your profile, each with the term that triggered it.
When to use search or barcode instead
A crumpled label, tiny multilingual print, or a product already in our database are all better handled another way — search by name, or use the barcode scanner to pull up a full product record instead of re-reading the panel from scratch.
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Related: Ingredient checker · Barcode scanner · Methodology