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When Will the Fooducate App be Available Outside the US?

10 Replies

Since launching the Fooducate iPhone App, we’ve been inundated with requests to make the app available worldwide. Our neighbors to the north in Canada are especially anxious to start using it.

But right now, you can only download the app from the US iTunes Store.

The reason is quite simple – we have no product information for foods outside the US. You see, each country has its own set of product barcodes, different from the ones in the US. Even identical products, such as cereals or snack bars, are packaged slightly differently, and that immediately requires a different UPC.

And so our database of  200,000+ products is of little value to consumers in Canada or Germany. In order for you to reap the benefit of Fooducate’s product rating system, we would need to get a sizable database of your country’s products into our system. We currently are unable to do that (issues of data availability, budget, and our bandwidth).

Additionally, each country has different labeling requirements and nutrition regulations. That means that some of the information we are using to calculate a product grade may not be readily available in your country.

That’s not to say we don’t want to get people Fooducated all over the world. It’s simply a bit more than we can chew on at this time. We do hope to provide the service in additional countries, but doubt it will happen this year.

If you’d like to be notified when Fooducate will be available in your country, please click here.

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  • Guest

    Any plans to support other mobile OS versions?

  • http://profiles.google.com/atrevelino amanda trevelino

    Congrats on the success of such an important app. Any specific plans for an Android app soon? I’d like to add a recommendation as a follow up to a recent food label-reading post, so just curious to know what’s in the pipeline (and already loyal to the droid 4G).
    Amanda — http://www.FullDISHclosure.com

  • Li

    such a shame… I live in Israel and would love to have something like that available here. the “organic movement” has recently started here and all these new supermarkets keep popping up. the fact of the matter is that they still sell crap, just marketed differently…. and with low public awareness, well… you can imagine!

  • Vince

    Why not make the app available so people can try it? 

    Consider my experience with MyFitnessPal and FatSecret. Both of these sites sport mobile apps with barcode scanning (Certainly their nutritional data is built from the USDA SRA). Nearly 95% of the time when I scan a barcode it works, and I get the appropriate product…even though I don’t live in the US. 

    • Crazyoats

      I agree. I work for a food Company that makes products for both Countries and in some cases there is no difference. I would love to try it, even if it’s not 100%

  • http://twitter.com/mlhLibrarian Michelle L Helliwell

    It’s too bad you couldn’t find a partner in Health Canada – there might be room for partnering to get Canadian info in there. From a prevention POV, they might have an interest.

  • Jonlewis

    we need this in Canada!!!!!

  • Ray Nicolini

    I do not think that its an issue if it works in Canada, I know for a fact the 9/10 time i works fine. I would love to have the app for when i visit USA.
    I know there is no issue on apples part to offer it in Canada (I hope)

  • http://twitter.com/ChrisGaglardi Chris Gaglardi

    If you live in Canada you can make a free US iTunes account with any free app code (search it, you’ll find something) log out of your iTunes account on your iPhone, login to the US one. Then you’re able to download US only apps including Fooducate :)

    After that you can just log back into your original account.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Cory-Kent/100001568258748 Cory Kent

    This argument is a bit specious in some ways. Canada and the U.S. have 90% of the same products. Other than a few store brand alternatives, all the name brands match across borders. So I don’t think they looked into it much. Besides, what harm is it to make it available with a disclaimer that not all brands may be in the database? You can’t possibly have every food down in the U.S. either.

    And lastly food labeling requirements vary across the different U.S. states too, so that is also a specious argument for not making it available. Just make it available already, and let us deal with the challenges. But blocking it? That’s a shame.

    @twitter-72649798:disqus just a note that I did log out yesterday and log in to the U.S. store, and when I went to download fooducate, it said it was unavailable to Canada. When you log in, it knows from where your iTunes ID originates I guess.