One scan, a verdict you can actually act on — here's exactly how it works under the hood.
Before your first scan, you tell Olive Avocado what you actually care about — added sugar, saturated fat, salt, ultra-processing, protein, fibre, calories, or any combination. Every verdict is weighed against that list, so two people scanning the same product can get a genuinely different, personally relevant answer.
Spotting "E471" on a label tells you nothing. Olive Avocado matches every additive against a database of over 290 E-numbers, each summarised from EFSA, FDA, and WHO/JECFA public food safety sources, with a clear risk tier — not just a code to look up yourself.
Milk, nuts, gluten, soybeans, fish, crustaceans, sesame — flag what you need to avoid once in settings, and every product (and every suggested swap) is automatically checked against it, with a clear warning banner when there's a match.
When a scanned product isn't great, Olive Avocado searches the same product category for something genuinely lower in whatever nutrient is driving your verdict — then links you straight to it on Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, or Amazon. Lidl and Aldi don't offer UK online grocery search, so those get an honest in-store mention instead of a dead link.
Home-cooked meals and restaurant plates don't have barcodes. Photograph one instead, and get an AI estimate of likely ingredients, allergens, and a calorie range — clearly marked as a visual estimate, since it can't see hidden ingredients like sauces, oils, or seasoning.
Every scan is saved to a local history you can revisit any time. Anything flagged as worth avoiding shows up in a dedicated "Swaps" tab with its suggested alternative, so you're not stuck remembering which products to avoid next time you're at the shop.
There's no login and no user account system. Your priorities, allergens, and scan history are stored locally on your device only — not on our servers, and not shared with any advertising SDK or analytics tracker.
Olive Avocado looks up the scanned barcode against Open Food Facts, a free, crowd-sourced product database, for its nutrition data, ingredients, and additive list. That data — plus your own stated priorities — is sent to Google's Gemini AI via our own server-side relay to generate a verdict and a plain-English summary of why.
Nothing about the outcome is for sale. There's no self-serve program for a brand to pay for a better score, and no advertising anywhere in the app to influence what gets shown.