If you avoid an ingredient, the ingredient list is the most important text on the packet and the hardest to read. It is long, it is in six-point type, and the thing you are looking for may be hiding under a name you do not recognise. Scanning the barcode is faster, and this page explains what that actually gets you, including the part most apps gloss over.
How scanning against your own list works
In Kaibu you set up a list under “Ingredients to avoid”: the fourteen ingredients European labelling law requires to be declared, plus the diets you follow. Then you scan, and the product is read against your list rather than against an average.
That is the difference between this and a scanner that grades products in general. A score out of 100 is the same number for everybody. A list is yours.
The three answers, and why there are only three
For every ingredient on your list, a scanned product comes back in one of three states:
- Contains. The record lists it in the ingredients.
- May contain. The manufacturer has put a trace warning on the pack.
- Not on file. The record has nothing either way.
There is no fourth state, and this is the part worth understanding before you trust any app with this job. Nothing in Kaibu ever renders as a green tick meaning the product is clear, because the data cannot support that claim. Absence from a crowd-sourced record is not absence from the product. It may mean nobody has filled that field in.
So “Not on file” is shown as its own grey answer, with a question mark, and it says to check the packaging. An app that quietly turns a missing field into reassurance is the failure mode this one is built to avoid.
What no scanner can tell you
Whichever app you use, and Kaibu is no exception:
- It reads a record, not the jar in your hand. Recipes change, packs differ by country, and the record may be older than the product.
- It cannot see the factory. Shared-line risk appears only when the manufacturer declares it.
- It is not advice. It reports what the label data says. What you do about that is between you and the people who advise you.
The packet is the authority. Every app in this category is a way of narrowing down what to check, not a replacement for checking.
Is it free?
Scanning in Kaibu is free and unmetered, with or without an account, and the list of ingredients to avoid is part of the free tier. What Premium adds is unlimited personal verdicts, the weekly recap, history that never expires, and typing a barcode in when the camera cannot read it; the free tier includes five personal verdicts a week.
Among the other apps, Yuka scans for free and its paid tier adds alerts over seven dietary preferences it chose. Fig gives five scans a month free and supports far more restrictions than anyone else. Olive is a paid subscription with a trial. There is a fuller comparison of all of them.
If what you avoid is unusual
Kaibu’s list covers the fourteen regulated ingredients and a set of common diets. If the thing you avoid is outside that, Fig’s list runs to thousands of options and is the better answer, and this site says so on its page. There is also a page on apps for alpha-gal, which is the clearest example of a restriction most apps have never heard of.
Kaibu is not a medical device and does not give medical, dietary or allergy advice. Label data is crowd-sourced and can be wrong or out of date. Always check the pack.