I built an app that tells you what's actually in your food (and it's not pretty)

I started this project because I got curious about what "natural flavors" actually meant on a cereal box. That rabbit hole led me to spending months digging through FDA databases, Health Canada's food additive lists, and EU safety assessments. What I found was genuinely unsettling.

The stuff hiding in your groceries

When you start cross-referencing ingredient lists with regulatory databases, patterns jump out fast.

Red 40 (Allura Red) is in everything. Kids' cereal, candy, sports drinks, even some breads. The EU requires a warning label on products containing it. The US and Canada? No warning required. Same chemical, different rules depending on which side of the border you're on.

Potassium bromate is banned in the EU, Canada, Brazil, and most of the world. It's still legal in US bread products. The FDA asked bakers to voluntarily stop using it back in 1991. Some did. Some didn't. The only way to know is to read the label, and most people don't.

BHA and BHT are preservatives found in cereal, chips, and chewing gum. They're classified as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen" by the National Toxicology Program, but the FDA still considers them GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) in small amounts.

Titanium dioxide was used in candy, coffee creamers, and frosting for decades. The EU banned it as a food additive in 2022. Still legal in North America.

This isn't fringe conspiracy stuff. These are documented regulatory differences sitting in publicly available databases. The information is there, it's just scattered across dozens of government websites in formats nobody can realistically parse while standing in a grocery aisle.

The data is public but unusable

The data exists. The FDA publishes its food additive database. Health Canada maintains a list of permitted food additives with usage limits. The EU has the OpenFoodFacts project and EFSA safety evaluations. IARC publishes carcinogen classifications.

But try using any of this while you're grocery shopping. You'd need to:

Read the ingredient list (often in 6pt font)
Know all 56+ names for sugar
Cross-reference each additive against FDA, EFSA, and IARC databases
Understand what "GRAS" actually means
Check if any of these additives are banned in other countries

Nobody does this. The information asymmetry between manufacturers and consumers is massive.

So I built Blume

Blume is an iOS app that does all of this in about 2 seconds. Scan a barcode or take a photo of an ingredient label, and it pulls up everything you'd want to know.

I aggregated data from public sources like OpenFoodFacts (a crowd-sourced database of 3M+ products), cross-referenced ingredients against regulatory databases from different countries, and used AI to generate plain-language explanations of what each ingredient actually does and why it might be concerning.

Each ingredient gets scored individually. Not just a vague "good" or "bad" rating, but specific flags: is this a known allergen, is it banned anywhere, does it contain hidden sugar, is it a petroleum-derived dye, does it have endocrine-disrupting properties.

Cosmetics are even worse

After building the food scanner, I expanded into cosmetics and skincare. The FDA doesn't require cosmetic products to be approved before they go on sale. The EU bans over 1,600 chemicals from cosmetics. The US bans about 11.

Blume handles beauty products the same way. Scan it, get a breakdown. Each ingredient scored for safety, with specific hazard flags (endocrine disruptor, carcinogen, allergen, irritant, environmental toxin). Plus a sustainability score for things like palm oil derivatives and microplastics.

What surprised me most

The products that look "healthy" are often the worst offenders. Protein bars loaded with sugar alcohols. "Natural" shampoos with sodium laureth sulfate. "Organic" snacks with 8 different sweeteners listed under different names so none of them appear as the first ingredient.

The problem was never that the information didn't exist. It was locked up in PDFs, CSV exports, and academic papers that no regular person would ever find.