About

Vegandex is an Android and iOS app that allows you to scan barcodes and search products to determine if they are vegan.

Why

Vegandex was started because I wanted an app that could quickly scan both groceries and things like toothpaste and shampoo to determine if they were vegan which also had the following criteria:

How it Works

Vegandex compiles data from retailer websites and the USDA Branded Foods database and tries to determine whether each product is vegan or vegetarian. This classification is made based on several factors:

  1. From the ingredient list. We have developed a comprehensive database of ingredients and their vegan status from scratch using information from sites like veganpeace.com, PubChem, The Vegetarian Resource Group, Wikipedia, Cosmetic Ingredient Review, SpecialChem, food-info.net, Code of Federal Regulations, and the FDA.
  2. From information on the retailer website. Some grocery store websites and cosmetic websites explicitly list whether a product is vegan or vegetarian. This is very helpful since products often contain ingredients which can be commercially produced from vegan or animal sources.
  3. From manufacturer websites. We have made a list of as many manufacturers we could find who explicitly state publicly that all of their products are vegan.
  4. From third-party websites and organizations like PETA, Leaping Bunny, Cruelty-Free Kitty, and Barnivore.

Caveats

There are several reasons that the vegan or vegetarian label can be wrong or not helpful:

Incomplete ingredient list

Sometimes items don't list an ingredient in the ingredients list. For example, often times meat products will only list extra ingredients added, but don't put the actual meat as an ingredient. Other times, it's simply due to an error on the part of whoever is adding the ingredients to the database, or they misspelled something. For example in the ingredients list for Beef Jerky, they misspelled beef as beet.

Unexpected ingredient list formatting

Sometimes ingredient lists are formatted in an unusual way which causes the algorithm we use to split the ingredients to miss an ingredient. These ingredient lists are very rare but it usually happens when they use certain punctuation marks like parentheses or colons in unconventional ways. For example, this ingredient list is "CATFISH CONTAINING A SOLUTION OF UP TO 15% (WATER, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, SALT)" which would get parsed as the ingredients: water, sodium phosphate, and salt. Right now we manually mark these as non-vegan when we find them.

Incorrectly marked vegan by website

Sometimes an item is marked as vegan by the website or manufacturer even though it isn't. For example the sunblock here is marked as vegan even though it contains beeswax. We mark items which are labelled as vegan by the retailer or manufacturer but contain a definitely non-vegan ingredient as non-vegan, but there are likely some cases where an item is incorrectly labelled vegan but has only maybe vegan ingredients in which case we would also incorrectly label it.

Incorrectly labelled ingredient

Although we have tried our best to correctly label every ingredient, it's always possible we made a mistake somewhere. If you find a mistake, please email us at support at vegandex dot com and we will try to fix it as soon as possible.

Ambiguous ingredients like natural flavors

This isn't a mistake per-se, but many products contain ambiguous ingredients like "natural flavors" which may or may not be vegan. In most cases the product is vegan, but since we rely solely on the ingredient list, we can't make any assumptions and so the item will be marked as maybe vegan. You can also manually set most of these ambiguous ingredients to vegan in the app.

Despite these caveats, we have worked hard to make sure that the vegan label is correct for the vast majority of the products in the database, and so hope that it will still be useful.