Why this site exists
Shopping with an allergy comes down to turning jars over. You stand at the shelf, you read the back, you put it back. Then again with the next product. For one packet of biscuits that is fine; for a week's shopping it takes you an hour.
The problem
The information is there. Every supermarket puts the ingredient list and the allergens online, neatly and in full. You just can't search on it. You can filter by brand, by price and by whether something is on offer, but not by the only question that matters when there is something you can't eat: where is what I can actually buy?
So you do it by hand. You search for ‘biscuits’, you open the first product, you scroll to the ingredients, you read, you go back. Fifty times. And next time you start all over again, because recipes change without anyone saying so.
What we made of it
This site turns that order around. You say once what you can't eat, and you only see what is left. We follow 69,471 products at 5 supermarkets, 30,931 of which have allergen information. Only those are shown by default: about the rest we simply don't know, and then it is more honest to leave them out than to put them among the safe ones. One click shows them anyway.
- Tick what you avoid. The fourteen allergens set by law are shown open; the rest are below them. Your choice is remembered, so you set it up once.
- Traces count if you want them to. ‘May contain traces of nuts’ is not an ingredient but a factory warning. With a mild allergy you ignore it, with a severe one you don't. That is a switch, not an assumption.
- Unknown is not the same as safe. Products without allergen information are hidden by default, instead of being put among the safe ones.
- Recipes change. We read every label again every week and show what has changed: what was added, what was taken out, and whether there is an allergen in it that wasn't there before.
- Scan in the shop. Scan the barcode with your phone, and you see straight away whether the product gets past your filters.
What it is not
It is not medical advice, and no substitute for the label in your hand. We read what the supermarket publishes, and that can lag behind the pack on the shelf at that moment. With a severe allergy, the pack always has the final say. If you see something here that is wrong, let us know — that is exactly the mistake we want to fix fastest.
We are not connected to any supermarket, there are no adverts on the site and there is no tracker in it. How we handle data is on the contact page.