My wife and I went vegan a few years ago. We quickly realised that it can sometimes be difficult to know if a food contains ingredients that aren’t vegan-friendly. We started using a popular barcode scanning app to help us check a food’s ingredients but got frustrated with how it didn’t always have an accurate list of ingredients for the food we were checking.
My background is in software development, so I realised that I could just make a service myself. This was the start of Chomp. Six months later I launched the Chomp website. The website made it possible for anyone to search for food or enter a barcode. Our algorithm would then check the food’s ingredients for 650+ ingredients that certain diets may want to avoid. This made it easy for someone who avoids gluten to quickly check if a food has an ingredient that contains gluten.
A year and a half later Chomp has checked the ingredients on over 600,000 foods for 115,000+ people. Traffic to the Chomp website has grown about 35% per month and most of the traffic is from mobile devices.
We started work on our app and after a few weeks were able to launch it on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The Chomp app makes it even easier to check if food is vegan, vegetarian, or gluten-free. You can scan barcodes, discover new food, and learn more about ingredients you may want to avoid.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the ability to enable “strict search.” This requires a free account but with it, you can search for food and only see results that are compatible with your diet. So if you’re vegan and want to get a few recommendations for vegan-friendly bread you would just enable “strict search” and type in “bread.” Chomp would then show you a list of bread that’s vegan-friendly.
The Chomp app is available for free and can be found on the Apple App Store, Google Play, and on the Amazon App Store. You can also use the Chomp website at https://chompthis.com.
Learn more about our apps at https://chompthis.com/app
Women Love Tech would like to thank Peter Merrill for his article.