One of the hardest things anyone with food allergies has to contend with is to read & decipher food labelling to make sure there is nothing in it that they may react to. For the main allergy groups such as Soya, Eggs & Dairy, food producers are obliged by law to indicate where the ingredient came from, but this doesn’t help with ingredients outwith those main allergy groups.
People with legume allergies from foods such as peas and beans will need to have knowledge that they also need to avoid certain gums for example. Having food allergies means constantly Googling ingredients.
At Mealeez, we recognise this problem and that is why over the last month we have had our heads down and tracked down as many ingredients as we could find and added them to our database, checking each one for potential allergens. It’s been a mammoth task and there is certainly more work to be done to ensure our list is as accurate as possible, but as things stand we now have one of the largest food ingredient databases that not only lists spelling variants but also lists local/regional names for ingredients (is it a neep, a turnip or a swede?!).
Our improved database means our food label scanner is more accurate at picking out ingredients you might not be able to have. We’ve also added the ability to tap the ingredient names so you can research for yourself the reasons why we have flagged them up.
We’ll continue to add ingredients as we add more recipes to Mealeez, but if you’ve spotted something we’ve missed or think we’ve made an error with any, please let us know!