CiCi · Foods

Gluten-free food guides

One guide per aisle. Each is built around the mechanism rather than a brand list. “Soy sauce is brewed on wheat, and tamari is the exception” stays true forever and works on a bottle nobody has written about. A list of brand names goes stale the moment anyone reformulates.

Gluten-free breadThe bread aisle is where the most gluten exposures start. More of its marketing language sounds health-adjacent than in any other category, and none of that language means gluten-free.Gluten-free beerThis is the one category where a legal label distinction maps onto a real medical distinction, and almost nobody explains which is which.Gluten-free soy sauceSoy sauce is the highest-frequency accidental exposure in restaurant eating, because it is in almost everything and almost nobody thinks of it as a wheat product.Gluten-free oatsOats are the only common food where the correct answer depends on which country you are standing in, and where a meaningful minority of people react even to perfectly clean oats.Gluten-free candyCandy is a good category to learn on, because it is small, the failure modes are few, and they recur everywhere else.Gluten-free sauces and condimentsA meal built entirely from naturally gluten-free ingredients is routinely undone at the last step by a spoonful of something from a jar.Gluten-free pastaThe noodle aisle is unusually forgiving once you know which base grain you are looking at, with one systematic exception.Gluten-free breakfast cerealCereal is the clearest demonstration of why an ingredient-list scanner that only looks for the word "wheat" is dangerous.Eating out gluten freeA published study found that a substantial share of restaurant food ordered as gluten free tested positive for gluten, with pizza and pasta the worst offenders by a wide margin.Gluten-free flourFlour is the category where a naturally gluten-free ingredient most often arrives contaminated, because milling equipment is expensive and rarely dedicated.Gluten in medications and supplementsThis is the category where the honest answer is most often "ask the manufacturer," and where scanners that give a confident verdict are least defensible.Gluten-free snacksA category where the base food is nearly always safe and the flavouring nearly always decides the answer.Gluten-free dairy and cheeseDairy is one of the safest aisles in the shop, which is why the few exceptions catch people off guard.Gluten-free meat and deliThis is the aisle where the regulatory technicality has real consequences, and almost no consumer guide mentions it.Gluten-free coffee, tea and drinksA category where the base drink is almost always fine and the additions decide the answer.Gluten-free bakingIn baking, the gluten-free question is less about safety and more about how a batter holds together without gluten.Gluten free for kids and schoolWritten for parents, and more about systems and social situations than about ingredient lists.Gluten free travelThe most useful travel tip is that a good translation card explains cross-contact rather than just naming gluten.Gluten-free frozen and convenience foodThe freezer aisle is where a naturally gluten-free food most often arrives with something added that nobody would have predicted.Gluten in cosmetics and household productsThis category is dominated by marketing, and the honest version saves people a great deal of unnecessary expense and worry.
The scanner

Reading a page is fine. Standing in the aisle is the hard part.

This site answers the question you knew to ask. The app answers the one you didn't: the barley malt in a rice cereal, the wheat starch in a gummy. Scan the barcode, or photograph the panel when the barcode isn't in any database, and CiCi shows which words on the label produced the answer.

  • 360,000+ packaged foods already read. Ingredient statement, allergen declaration and nutrition panel, each one assessed by the same rules you can see working on this page, so most scans are an instant answer rather than a lookup.
  • Unlimited scanning, about two seconds an answer. Fig and Spoonful both cut you off at five scans a month.
  • Carbs and the full nutrition panel on every scan. Total and net carbohydrate with the arithmetic shown. For the roughly 6% of people with type 1 diabetes who have coeliac disease too, that is two apps collapsed into one.
  • Your glutening log. Record a reaction and CiCi shows what those days had in common. It counts overlaps and never tells you what caused it.
  • Saved products. The regular shop in one place, so next week is not a re-scan of the same forty items.
  • Scanning happens on your device. No scan is ever attached to you, sold, or sent to an analytics service.
Try it free for 14 days →See pricing

14 days free, then $29.99 a year. Cheaper than Fig, and it does what three separate apps do. This website stays free forever either way: every answer on it, permanently, with no account.

Where to go next

Ingredients A–ZNearly a thousand ingredient names, each with its classification and the rule behind it.ListsHidden sources of gluten and the safe foods people avoid unnecessarily.LearnThe things worth understanding once so you never look them up again.Get the scannerEvery guide here is free forever. The app is 14 days free, then $29.99 a year.