Greek app scans product labels for health risks
A new app can tell consumers whether products such as food and cosmetics contain dangerous ingredients in an instant. Ingredio, developed by a Greek startup founded by chemist Zoe Cournia, scans the ingredients of a product for any flagged chemicals and informs users of possible risks.
“An increasing number of consumers are expressing such concerns, as, due to the long, unknown chemical names and the codification of ingredients, they cannot discern what is safe, what has been labeled as potentially toxic, allergenic or not,” Cournia explains to Kathimerini.
Once consumers have downloaded the Ingredio app on their smartphones, they can take a photo of the ingredients label of a product which the app transforms into text before checking each ingredient against those in the chemicals database created by the Ingredio team. The data come from sources including the European Commission, the World Health Organization and the US National Institutes of Health.
Within seconds the results appear on the phone’s screen and are color-coded according to each product’s potential risk, Cournia says.
