About VeganCheckr

Who is behind this

VeganCheckr is built and written by Marwan Akhandaf, an independent iOS developer. It is not a company, a venture-backed startup or a content farm. One person builds the app, maintains the ingredient rules and writes every guide on this site.

The relevant experience is narrow but real: this is the third food-label scanner I have shipped. HalalFoodScan launched in 2019 and FoodCheckr in 2023, both solving the same underlying problem from a different angle, which is that an ingredient list tells you what is in a product but almost never tells you where it came from. VeganCheckr launched in August 2024 and is currently on version 1.0.10.

How the app decides

A verdict is only useful if you can check it, so VeganCheckr shows its reasoning rather than a bare yes or no. When you scan a barcode, the app looks the product up, reads its ingredient list, and applies three separate passes:

1. Named animal ingredients. Gelatin, casein, whey, honey, carmine, shellac and their aliases are matched directly. These are unambiguous.
2. Additives whose source varies. E471 and E322 can be plant or animal derived. Rather than flagging every instance and training you to ignore warnings, the app downgrades the warning when the label itself declares a plant source, and flags the ambiguity when it does not.
3. Category rules. Some products are not vegetarian for reasons the ingredient list never states. Parmigiano Reggiano, Grana Padano, Pecorino Romano and Gorgonzola are made with animal rennet under their PDO specifications, so the app knows to flag them even though the word "rennet" rarely appears on the pack.

Every flagged ingredient is listed on the result screen with the reason it fired. If a product has no barcode, or is missing from the database, the camera can read the printed ingredient list instead.

What the app cannot do

Worth being blunt about the limits, because no scanner app should be trusted blindly:

• Recipes change, and databases lag. A product reformulated last month may still carry last year's ingredient list.
• Some things are genuinely unknowable from a label. Wine and beer fining agents usually do not have to be declared. "Natural flavors" can legally hide an animal source. Whether cane sugar was filtered through bone char is not on any pack.
• Regional differences are real. The same brand can use different recipes in different countries.

Where an honest answer is "the label cannot tell you", the guides say so instead of guessing.

How the guides are researched

Every factual claim on this site is meant to trace back to a primary source, not to another blog. In practice that means:

• Regulation text from EUR-Lex for EU rules (additive authorisations under Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008, allergen labelling under Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011) and the Code of Federal Regulations for US rules.
• Safety assessments from EFSA, and nutrition guidance from bodies such as the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements.
• Definitional questions (what counts as vegan, how to treat "may contain" warnings) referred to The Vegan Society's published position rather than our own preference.
• Brand and product claims checked against the manufacturer's own current listing, with the date of checking stated, because these go stale fastest.

Where sources genuinely disagree, or where something could not be verified, the guides hedge and say why. Articles carry a "last updated" date so you can judge how stale a claim might be.

If a page here tells you something with more confidence than the evidence supports, that is a bug, and it is worth reporting in exactly the same way as a crash.

Corrections and contact

Two routes, both read by the person who wrote the page:

• A wrong verdict in the app is best reported from the product screen itself, which sends the barcode along with the report so the rule can be checked against the actual product.
• Anything on this website, including a factual error, a dead link or a product whose recipe has changed, can be raised through the App Store listing.

How this site makes money

It does not, directly. There are no ads, no affiliate links and no sponsored placements anywhere on vegancheckr.com. The app is free to download and free to scan without limits; an optional Premium upgrade adds convenience features.

The obvious conflict of interest is that this site is published by the people who make one of the apps it writes about. Where a page compares VeganCheckr against other scanners, that ownership is stated in the page itself, and the claims made about competitors are limited to what you can verify on their own store listings.

Privacy, briefly

The app's App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected". There is no account, and scan history stays on your device. The website sets no cookies and runs no third-party analytics. The privacy policy has the detail.