About VeganCheckr

Who is behind this

This website is published by VeganCheckr. Operator and privacy-contact information is available in the privacy notice. This website supports the VeganCheckr apps and publishes practical food-label guides. It is not an independent product-testing laboratory or a medical advice service.

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 manufacturing details may not be disclosed in the ingredient list. These can include fining agents, flavour sources or sugar-processing methods. Ask the maker when those details matter.
• 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

The VeganCheckr editorial name identifies this site's publishing work, not a panel of independent specialists. The October 2026 articles were drafted and edited with AI assistance, including a second source and readability check. That is not a claim of independent human review, professional dietary advice or hands-on product testing. Product examples refer to the linked manufacturer records, not products we purchased or tested.

Generated food images are editorial illustrations and are labelled as such. They are not photographs of verified product labels, laboratory results or certification marks. Real app screenshots are identified separately.

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

To contact the site operator about a correction:

• 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 sent to the privacy and support contact.

How this site makes money

It does not, directly. There are no ads, no affiliate links and no sponsored placements on vegancheckr.com. VeganCheckr is free to download for iPhone and Android, with optional Premium upgrades. Full ingredient details or explanations may require Premium on iPhone as well as Android. Features and purchase options differ by platform. An app result cannot establish an undisclosed supplier source.

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

App functionality can involve product-database requests, purchase records, anonymous app identifiers and paywall analytics. Current iOS source includes RevenueCat and Superwall; Android has its own SDK and purchase-related processing. A store privacy label is not an independent audit of these data flows. Neither version requires a VeganCheckr account. The website sets no cookies and runs no third-party analytics. Optional first-party store-click counting is off until a visitor enables it in the footer; it stores daily totals by page and destination, not visitor identifiers. Read the platform-specific privacy policy for details.