Primo Vegan: Food Scanner

Primo Vegan is a vegan scanner and ingredient checker for anyone who buys veg food in packets. It reads what is printed on a food label and tells you what the label declares.

Use it as a food checker in the shop: point the camera at the ingredients panel, or at the barcode, and you get one of four answers: no animal ingredients found, vegetarian but not vegan, not vegetarian, or cannot determine. Every answer names the ingredient that decided it.

THE INGREDIENT THAT DECIDED IT
A scanner that says "not vegan" and stops there leaves you guessing. Primo Vegan names the gelatine, the carmine, the whey or the honey that changed the answer, so the decision stays yours.

VEGAN AND VEGETARIAN ARE TWO ANSWERS
Milk, egg, honey, beeswax and lanolin come from a living animal. Gelatine, carmine, isinglass and animal rennet do not. Most scanners collapse the two into one red flag. Primo Vegan keeps them apart, because for a lot of shoppers that is the whole question.

VEG OR NON-VEG, AND EGG
Primo Vegan uses the international meaning of vegetarian, which allows egg. If you eat by the Indian veg rule, where egg is non-veg, read the ingredient list for egg whenever the answer is vegetarian but not vegan.

WHEN THE DATABASE HAS NEVER SEEN THE PRODUCT
Barcode databases are large and still incomplete. Store brands, regional lines and new packaging fall outside them. When a barcode returns nothing, Primo Vegan works as a food label scanner and reads the printed ingredients panel from your photo instead, so the scan still ends in an answer.

WHEN THE APP DOES NOT KNOW
Some ingredients and E numbers never state their origin. Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), natural flavouring, vitamin D3 and L-cysteine (E920) can be animal or plant. Primo Vegan says cannot determine and names the ingredient, instead of guessing in either direction.

WHAT A SCAN GIVES YOU
- The verdict in plain words, with the ingredient behind it
- Vegan and vegetarian as separate answers, never merged
- Every ingredient marked plant based, animal but vegetarian, not vegetarian, or unknown
- Any vegan or vegetarian claim printed on the pack, shown beside the verdict
- "May contain" statements quoted exactly as they appear
- Barcode lookup and label reading from the same shutter press
- Your scan history kept on the device

WHAT THIS APP IS NOT
Primo Vegan reports what a label declares. It does not certify anything, and it cannot see what a label does not print. Processing aids such as bone char in sugar refining or isinglass in wine fining are never declared on the pack, which is why a clean ingredient list reads "No animal ingredients found" and never "Vegan".

This is not an allergy tool. A vegan answer is not a dairy-free or an egg-free medical answer. "May contain milk" statements are shown but do not change the verdict, because a shared production line is not an ingredient. If you are managing an allergy, read the pack and follow medical advice.

Always check the pack.

Product data comes from Open Food Facts, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). See https://openfoodfacts.org