Confused in the shopping aisle? There’s an app for that

How many times have you been shopping for something healthy and wanted to know more about a product and just couldn’t understand the mumbo jumbo on the packaging? What does “Packed in Australia from local and imported ingredients” mean anyway? Australian food labels are confusing and they’re giving everyday shoppers a headache. But could the power to learn more be in your hands i.e., your smart phone?

Now, more and more fed-up consumers are informing themselves about what’s going in their trolleys and they’re doing it with their smart phones, and you can too. Since a Hepatitis A outbreak last month, where 27 Australians were diagnosed with the disease, there has been an outcry for more information about where our food is coming from so we can make better choices at the supermarket.

If you’ve heard of scanning apps before that you can use to scan barcodes, and thought they were only available overseas, we have some good news: there are quite a few apps that can give you information about Australian foods and decipher those confusing labels.

Here are some other nifty apps that could help you next time you’re in the supermarket:

Foodswitch – available for Android and iOS

easy-to-interpret nutritional data for most packaged food in grocery stores. You can use the “SaltSwitch” and “GlutenSwitch” modes too.