For parents who read every label
You’ve read the back of that box three times. You still don’t know.
Scan the barcode. In about three seconds, KidSafeScan checks that product against every allergy in your family — all of them, at once — and answers in one word. Safe. Caution. Avoid.
No health scores. No 0-to-100. No guessing what “caseinate” is while your four-year-old pulls on your cart.
Free for 10 scans a month, forever. Unlimited family members on every plan. iPhone first — US launch.
KidSafeScan helps you read labels faster — it never replaces them. Always check the physical label before you serve.
The part nobody sees
You do this nine hundred times a year.
You have to be right nine hundred times.
Every grocery run is the same unpaid job: read, decode, decide, repeat — and then explain the whole thing again to your partner, your mother-in-law, the daycare. It has nothing to do with whether a food is healthy. It’s one question, asked over and over: is this safe for my kid?
The font is 6 points. Your reading glasses are in the car.
Aisle 7, cart half full, one kid asking for the blue box. You're squinting at a panel of ingredients printed in gray on silver foil.
You don't know what half of these words mean.
Caseinate. Lactalbumin. Hydrolyzed wheat protein. Natural flavors. Any one of them could be the thing you've spent four years avoiding.
“May contain peanuts” — so does it, or doesn't it?
Nobody tests that sentence. Nobody regulates it. Nobody is even required to print it. And you have to make a call, right now, standing there.
You already bought this one. Twice.
Then they changed the recipe and told no one. The box looks identical. That's the part that wakes you up at 3 a.m.
U.S. kids has a food allergy — roughly two in every classroom
a food allergy reaction sends someone in the U.S. to the emergency room
Source: Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE).
Why another scanner
A 92-out-of-100 granola bar can still put your kid in an ambulance.
The scanner apps you already have grade food on nutrition, additives and organic certification. That’s a good answer to a preference question — is this stuff good for us?
Allergens are not a preference question. They’re a safety question, and safety questions can’t be answered with a number. The most popular scanner in the country says outright that it can’t account for trace allergens. So a bar can be genuinely healthy and genuinely dangerous at the same time, and the screen will still be green.
We don’t score food. We answer the one question a score can’t.
Whole grains. Low added sugar. No controversial additives. Every word of that is true.
Contains whey. Made on equipment shared with peanuts. Also true — and it’s the only part that matters tonight.
Same bar. Same barcode. Different question.
How it works
Three seconds, three words, no homework.
Set it up once on the couch. After that it’s one motion in the aisle — the way it should have been the whole time.
Add everyone you feed.
Noah's peanuts and tree nuts. Ivy's milk and egg. Your celiac. Tell us how severe each reaction is, and we'll set the bar accordingly — anaphylaxis by default, because the wrong default here is not a UX problem.
Point the camera.
Barcode, or shoot the ingredients panel — they're two equal paths, not a feature and a fallback. Product not in our database? The camera still gives you an answer. You never hit a dead end holding a box in a store.
Read one word.
Safe, Caution, or Avoid — for every person in your family, on one screen, in about three seconds. Colour, icon and text all say the same thing, so it reads at a glance and it works if you're colourblind.
What’s different
Built for the family you actually have.
Everyone. At once.
You’re not shopping for one kid. Other apps give you a single profile and make you switch. One KidSafeScan scan returns a verdict for every person you’ve added — child, spouse, yourself — side by side, no tapping.
No scores. No stars. No math.
You have one hand free and eleven seconds before someone melts down. There is nothing to interpret here — three words, each one backed by a colour and an icon so it survives a glance, bad lighting, and colourblindness.
We know milk’s other 40 names.
Milk doesn’t always say milk. Our allergen dictionary carries 20–60 aliases, derivatives and E-numbers per allergen — and when we flag one, we tell you what it is and why it matters, with the source printed underneath.
Tap anything highlighted
“Why can’t she have this?” — answered before she asks.
Every flagged ingredient opens into a plain-English paragraph: what it is, which allergen family it belongs to, and why it matters for this child specifically. Written and reviewed ahead of time, cached on your phone, with the source cited. Never generated on the fly — you shouldn’t have to wonder whether a machine improvised your child’s safety.
The sentence that ruins your evening
“May contain peanuts” is not a promise. We treat it like a threat.
That phrase is voluntary. No agency tests it, no law requires it, and two identical products can carry it or not carry it for reasons that have nothing to do with your child. Most scanner apps skip it entirely — it isn’t in the ingredient list, so it isn’t in the data.
We parse every phrasing of it. And if you’ve told us your child’s reaction is anaphylactic, it stops being a warning and becomes Avoid. Because at that severity, “probably fine” is not a risk you were ever going to take.
When we can’t tell, we never say safe.
There is no code path in KidSafeScan that returns SAFE under uncertainty. If the data is stale, the ingredient field is incomplete, or the camera read badly, you get Can’t tell yet and a request to photograph the panel. Uncertainty falls toward caution — that’s a rule in the engine, not a preference.
- “may contain peanuts”
- “processed in a facility that also processes tree nuts”
- “manufactured on shared equipment”
- “made in a bakery that uses wheat”
Automatic promotion for any family member tagged anaphylactic. You set the severity once; the engine carries it into every scan from then on.
Caregiver card
You can’t be in every kitchen.
Grandma’s house. Daycare snack day. The birthday party you weren’t asked to stay for. Every one of those is a person trying their best with a list they half-remember from a text you sent in March.
Send them one page instead: what your child must avoid, the hidden names to watch for, and exactly what to do if a reaction starts. It opens in any browser. No app, no account, no password — nothing between them and the information when it counts.
And when the product changes, so does their copy. You update it once.
- Grandparents
- Daycare
- Babysitters
- School nurse
- Coaches
Privacy
Your child’s medical information never leaves your phone.
An app that knows a four-year-old’s name, birthday and anaphylaxis triggers is holding something that should never be for sale. So we built it so we can’t sell it, leak it, or be subpoenaed for it — we simply don’t have it.
Profiles stay on your phone.
Your children's names, ages and diagnoses live in the device and in your own iCloud. Not in our database — we don't have one for that.
Our server sees a barcode. That's all.
A lookup goes out as a number with nothing attached to it. We couldn't tell you which family asked, or why.
No allergen data to analytics. Ever.
Not to ad networks, not to third-party SDKs, not in aggregate, not anonymised. This is a child's medical information and it is not a growth input.
“No health data collected” on the App Store.
That's the privacy label we intend to ship under. It's only possible because we designed the whole thing to make it true.
Straight answers
The questions you’d ask if we were standing there.
Does this mean I can stop reading labels?
No — and we'd rather lose you as a customer than let you believe otherwise. KidSafeScan makes the label faster to read and catches names you'd miss. It does not replace the physical label, because manufacturers change recipes without changing the box. Every verdict screen says so, in the same size type as the verdict itself.
What if the product isn't in your database?
Then you photograph the ingredients panel and get the same verdict from the same rules engine. Barcode and camera are two equal paths, not a feature and a fallback — because a scanner that shrugs at you in the middle of a store is worse than no scanner at all.
Which allergens do you cover?
The nine FDA major allergens — milk, egg, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame — plus any ingredient you type in yourself. Free-typed ingredients are matched literally, without alias expansion, and we label them that way in the profile so you always know which kind of check you're getting.
Is this medical advice?
It is not. KidSafeScan is an information tool that helps you read a label. It doesn't diagnose, treat, or tell you what your child can tolerate — that conversation belongs to you and your allergist.
How is the verdict decided? Is it AI?
The verdict comes from a deterministic rules engine — the same input always produces the same output, and every decision can be traced to a rule. Language models are used only to pre-write the plain-English explanations, offline, reviewed by a human before they ship. No model is in the loop when we decide whether your child can eat something.
When can I actually use it?
We're building toward a US iPhone launch and running TestFlight with parents first. Join the list and you'll get one email when a build is ready for you — that's the only thing we'll send.
Android? Web?
iPhone first, on purpose: on-device text recognition and iCloud-only storage are what let us promise that nothing leaves your phone. Android follows once the rules engine and the allergen dictionary have been proven in real stores.
Early access
Next Tuesday you’ll be standing in aisle 7 again.
Be holding your phone instead of your reading glasses. Join the TestFlight list and we’ll email you once — when there’s a build you can actually take to the store.
One email when it’s ready. No newsletter, no drip sequence, no selling your address. Unsubscribe in one click.