Food Barcode Scanner

Fast and easy food logging

Instead of typing product names and hunting through search lists, simply scan the barcode on packaged items to populate exact nutrition labels. You can adjust serving sizes and log foods straight to your daily diary in one tap.

Works across all your devices

Whether you’re using an iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or laptop with a webcam, the scanner operates smoothly in modern browsers without needing native app installation.

Which barcodes does it read?

The scanner reads the standard retail symbologies printed on food packaging:UPC-A and UPC-E (North America),EAN-13 and EAN-8 (Europe, UK, Australia and most of the world) and JAN codes (Japan). If the camera cannot get a clean read — glossy packaging, a curved bottle, low light — type the digits printed under the bars into the manual lookup box and you will get the same result.

Tips for a faster scan

• Hold the barcode 10–15 cm from the lens and keep it flat and fully in frame.
• Move into brighter light, or tilt the pack slightly to kill glare from a flash.
• On curved cans and bottles, angle the pack so the whole code is in focus at once.
• Allow camera permission when the browser asks — nothing is uploaded or recorded.

Scanned a product that is missing or wrong?

Packaged-food barcodes are looked up in Open Food Facts, a crowd-sourced global database. Coverage is excellent for major brands but a new or regional product may be missing, and label values are only as accurate as whoever entered them. When that happens, search our USDA food database for the underlying ingredient instead — the analytical data there is measured in a lab and is often the better number for whole foods such as chicken breast, rice or oats.

How to read the label the scan pulls in

A scan hands you a label. Four numbers on it do most of the work, and one of them is the one people skip:

1. Serving size, in grams. Read this first, always. Everything below it is per serving, not per pack, and "2.5 servings per container" is how a 600-calorie bag reports 240 calories.
2. Calories. Multiply by the servings you actually ate before you compare it to anything.
3. %DV. The FDA's own rule of thumb: 5% or less of the Daily Value is low in that nutrient, 20% or more is high. It applies to the things you want more of (fibre) and less of (sodium, saturated fat) alike.
4. Added sugars. The separate line matters because total sugars include the lactose in milk and the fructose in fruit, which are not the target of any sugar guideline.

Label numbers are rounded by law

US Nutrition Facts panels are rounded to fixed increments under 21 CFR 101.9(c), which is why a scanned product can never be more precise than these bands:

The practical consequence: "0 g" on a label means "less than half a gram per serving", not none. Across a day of small servings — cooking spray, creamer, chewing gum — rounded-down zeros add up to real calories, and a product with three servings in the pack rounds three times.

What the barcode number itself tells you

The digits under the bars are a GTIN — a Global Trade Item Number. UPC-A is a 12-digit GTIN-12, EAN-13 a 13-digit GTIN-13, and the short codes on small packs are GTIN-8. Three things about them are worth knowing when a scan does not resolve:

• The last digit is a checksum. It is derived from the others by a modulo-10 calculation, which is how the scanner rejects a misread instead of returning the wrong product. If a manually typed code is refused, you almost certainly transposed a digit.
• The prefix is not a country of origin. It identifies the GS1 member organisation that issued the number, so a product with a UK prefix can be made anywhere. Country-of-origin claims based on barcode prefixes are a myth.
• Some prefixes are store-only. Codes beginning 02, 04 and 20–29 are reserved for restricted distribution — the labels a supermarket prints at the deli counter or the weighing scale. They encode a weight and a price for that shop's till, not a product any public database can look up.

A GTIN also identifies a specific pack size, so the 330 ml and 1 L versions of the same drink are different numbers, while the same brand sold in another country may share a name and nothing else.

Scan, or search the whole-food database?

The two sources are good at different things. Use whichever suits the food in front of you:

Why two sources disagree about the same food

Scan a pack of oats and compare it with the oats entry in our database and the numbers will differ slightly. Every reason is legitimate:

• Rounding. The label is rounded to the increments above; the USDA record is not.
• Reformulation. Recipes change, and label data lags the shelf.
• Regional recipes. The same brand and name can be a different product in another market, with its own barcode and its own numbers.
• Different energy factors. EU labels count fibre at 2 kcal/g under Regulation 1169/2011, while US labels use the Atwater general factors, so a high-fibre food legitimately reports different calories on each continent.
• As sold versus as eaten. Dry pasta and cooked pasta are the same calories and very different weights. Check which state the entry describes.

None of this is a rounding error worth agonising over: a few percent on one food is far smaller than the error from guessing a portion. Weigh the food, then take whichever source describes it more precisely.

If the camera will not start

1. Check for HTTPS. Browsers only grant camera access in a secure context, so look for the padlock in the address bar.
2. Re-enable the permission. Once you dismiss or block the prompt, the browser stops asking. Reset the camera permission for this site in its site settings, then reload.
3. Leave the in-app browser. Webviews inside social and messaging apps frequently withhold camera access. Open the page in Safari, Chrome or your usual browser.
4. Close whatever else is using the camera. A video call holding the device camera will prevent the page from acquiring it.
5. Type the digits instead. The manual lookup box returns exactly the same product data, and it always works.

From scan to a real plan

Scanning tells you what is in the pack; it does not tell you how much you should eat. Get your daily target from the calorie calculator, split it with the macro calculator, then log every scan in the free calorie tracker. If you are choosing between products at the shelf, our ranked high-protein and low-calorie food lists show what good looks like per 100 g.

Private by design

Video never leaves your device — decoding happens in your browser, and only the decoded barcode number is sent to look up the product. There is no account, no tracking profile and no ads, and your diary stays in your browser's local storage.