Editorial policy

A site publishing nutrition numbers should say where they come from and what it does when they are wrong. This is that statement.

Sourcing

Packaged products come from Open Food Facts, under the Open Database Licence. We do not retype or adjust the panel: what the record holds is what we show, converted into the units the page is displaying.

Reference figures for whole foods — the tables of common foods on this site — are taken from USDA FoodData Central, which is the reference standard for unbranded foods and is in the public domain.

Photo estimates are generated at the moment you scan, by an AI vision model. They are not drawn from any database and are not reviewed by a human before you see them, which is why they are labelled as estimates and shown with a confidence level.

What we verify

Before publishing a figure in an article or a reference table we check it against at least one independent source, and we prefer the more conservative of two when they disagree. Where a number is contested — the calorie cost of cooking oil absorbed during frying is a good example — we say that it is contested rather than picking a side and presenting it as settled.

Unit conventions

Energy is shown in kilocalories, written kcal and spoken as "calories" in the way food labelling uses the word. Where a label gives kilojoules only, we convert at 4.184 kJ per kcal and say so. Sodium is shown in milligrams; where a record carries salt rather than sodium we divide by 2.5, the standard conversion, and note it.

AI and this site

The photo scanner is an AI feature and is described as one everywhere it appears. Our written articles are researched and edited by people; we do not publish machine-generated articles under a human byline. Where an article discusses what the AI scanner can and cannot do, those claims come from our own testing.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, email support@caloriescanner.io with the page and the correct value. Substantive corrections to an article are noted at the foot of that article with the date. Errors in a packaged-product record are fixed upstream at Open Food Facts, which corrects it everywhere rather than only here.

Commercial relationships

We take no payment for inclusion in a comparison, and no affiliate commission from any app we compare ourselves against. Where we say a competitor does something better than we do — and on the comparison pages we do say that — it is because it is true. Our own revenue comes from subscriptions, described on the pricing page.