The Food Additive Lens iPhone App Leverages AI to Give Users Expert Information on Additives Instantly as they Shop
A new App for iPhone 14 and newer called Food Additive Lens uses AI to help consumers and professionals understand ingredients and additives in food. When consumers have questions about additives, they need easy-to-find authoritative information on them when they are shopping to help answer their questions. While reliable information is available in books and journals, it is hard for shoppers to access—until now. Now everyone can get clear and trustworthy information within seconds using the free App that works right at the store. The app uses a Three-Agent AI System to classify foods, find additives, and gives plain language explanations, while keeping user information private.
Downloading and Using the App
The Food Additive Lens App is free to download on the Mac App Store and works with iPhones 14 and up. Users simply scan an ingredient label with their phone cameras and take a photo of it. The App then analyzes the image, and uses AI to categorize the food, identify additives, and finally, to explain what they are and what their function is in food. For deeper dives, health professionals can also find regulatory details and technical information instantly on the Food Additive Lens App.
App Draws Information from Scientific Databases and Authoritative Sources
It relies on trusted government data. For example, the food classifier was trained on 10,000 foods from the USDA's Global Branded Food Products Database. The app includes information on over 4,000 FDA-approved additives, offering both official definitions and easy-to-understand explanations of what they are from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also uses other trusted sources like the FDA’s Substances Added to Foods Database to give accurate, evidence-based definitions that make complex food science easy to understand and lessen confusion. The app was created by Yihang Feng, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, during a summer research assistantship at IAFNS.