CiCi · The app

The scanner that shows its work

Name: CiCi
Price: 29.99 USD

Every gluten scanner can read a barcode. The hard part is that a US label is required to declare wheat and is not required to declare barley or rye hiding inside a natural flavour. If you can't see the reasoning, you are trusting someone else's guess.

Start the 14-day trial →Scan a label free

Works in the browser today. iOS and Android apps are in progress, and the web scanner is the same engine.

A woman pushing a trolley through a supermarket with her phone in her hand — The moment CiCi is for: a package in one hand, a phone in the other.

How it works

Point it at the barcode

Barcode reading happens on the device itself, so the camera frame never leaves your phone. If the product is not in any database, photograph the ingredient panel instead and CiCi reads the printed text.

CiCi highlights the words that decided it

You get the text on the label that produced the answer, marked up in place, with the rule and the regulation next to it. If the reasoning is wrong, you can see it.

And says so plainly when she cannot tell

"Can't verify" is a real answer here. On a US label, barley inside a natural flavour need not be declared, so on a package with no gluten-free claim there are questions that honestly cannot be closed. Every other scanner shows a green tick anyway.

What the app does

✓ 360,000+ packaged foods already read
Ingredient statement, allergen declaration and nutrition panel, imported from Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central and assessed by the same rules you can watch work on this site. It means most scans return an answer immediately instead of waiting on somebody else's API. A barcode that is not in there still gets looked up live, or read off a photograph of the panel.
✓ Unlimited barcode scans
No monthly cap. Fig, Spoonful and Sift each cut you off at five scans a month, and one 2025 entrant limits you to one scan a day. Five scans does not cover one grocery trip.
✓ Unlimited AI photo label reads
For the products no database has ever heard of. Photograph the ingredient panel and CiCi reads it the same way, with the same reasoning and the same citations.
✓ Carbs and the full nutrition panel on every scan
Total and net carbohydrate with the arithmetic printed rather than hidden. Around 6% of people with type 1 diabetes also have coeliac disease, roughly six times the background rate. No other app in this category answers both questions in one place. CiCi shows the numbers and never calculates a dose.
✓ The full reasoning on every verdict
Every rule that fired, the label text that triggered it, and the regulation behind it.
✓ The glutening log
Record a reaction and CiCi looks back across everything you scanned before it, then across your other reactions, to find what they have in common. It shows you the pattern. It never tells you what caused it.
✓ Saved products and lists
Your regular shop in one place, so the weekly trip is not a re-scan of the same forty items.

On the way, and not included yet

These are built or not built, never “coming soon” in a price list. You are not paying for anything below until it appears in the list above.

Export everything, any timeYour scans, your saved products and your reaction history, as a file you keep.Recall and reformulation alertsOn the products you have saved. Wired to the FDA enforcement feed.Chef cards in 60+ languagesA card that explains cross-contact rather than just naming gluten.Medication and supplement checkerAllergen labelling law does not cover prescription drugs, so the rules are different.Offline country packsRules, phrasebook and certified venues, before you fly.

What makes it different

“Can't verify” is a real answerMost groceries carry no gluten-free claim, which means nobody has tested them and nobody has taken responsibility. That is not the same as safe, and CiCi says so.

It fails closedAn ingredient CiCi does not recognise produces caution, never a green tick.

It knows which country you are inAustralia and New Zealand ban oats in gluten-free food entirely. Chile is under 1 ppm. Canada treats oats as a gluten source. The right answer changes at the border.

It knows which agency wrote the rulesBare “starch” on an FDA food label is corn, because wheat would have to be declared. On a USDA meat label that inference does not hold.

Your scans are not dataNo scan is attached to an identity, sold, or sent to an analytics service. Diet and diagnosis are health data and we treat them that way.

It corrects the databases it readsTeff is entirely gluten free and several public ingredient taxonomies flag it anyway. CiCi carries an explicit correction layer over the upstream data.

Start now. No card, no account required to scan

The web scanner runs the same engine as the app and works on any phone with a camera.

Start the free trial →

Read up before you shop

Gluten-free breadOrdinary bread is wheat and contains gluten. Gluten-free bread is a separate product category built from rice, sorghum, tapioca and starch blends. The…Gluten-free beerOrdinary beer is brewed from barley and contains gluten. Two different things sit on the shelf labeled for gluten-avoiders. Beer brewed from sorghum o…Gluten-free soy sauceMost soy sauce is not gluten free. Conventional soy sauce is brewed from roughly equal parts soybean and wheat, and the wheat is fundamental to the fe…Gluten-free oatsOats contain no gluten of their own, but the answer changes by country and by supply chain. In the US and EU, oats labeled gluten-free are permitted; …Gluten-free candyMost hard candy, most gummies and most plain chocolate are gluten free. Four things decide the rest: wheat flour in wafers and cookie pieces, barley m…Gluten-free sauces and condimentsCondiments are where gluten hides most reliably. Soy sauce is a wheat product, most Worcestershire outside the US contains malt vinegar, gravy and rou…