A reading aid for ingredient panels
Ingredients know how to hide. Piiloperuna finds them.
Point your phone camera at the ingredient panel on a package. Piiloperuna reads the list and points to the words on your own list, including the derivatives that do not name their source.
Piiloperuna does not guarantee that a product is safe. It tells you what is printed on the package. The decision is yours.
Who it is for
It is hardest for the person shopping on someone else’s behalf.
An allergic person knows their own ingredients by heart. The people around them do not. Ingredient panels are chemistry in small print, and reading them product by product is exhausting. So the same familiar, safe thing ends up in the basket every time.
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Grandparents
You want to offer your grandchild something nice and cannot remember whether it was milk, wheat, or both.
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Family
You shop for the same person every week, and every new product still has to be read from the start.
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Friends and godparents
You invited people over and would like everyone at the table to eat the same thing.
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Workplaces and clubs
The coffee table, the hike, the Christmas party. Someone in the group cannot eat just anything.
Where the name comes from
A piiloperuna is the potato a package does not call potato.
An ingredient panel does not have to say which plant its starch came from. “Modified starch”, “dextrin” and “E1442” can each be potato, or not be. The same goes for many other allergenic substances: they stand in the list under a name you would never connect to anything.
Piiloperuna knows these derivatives and points them out to you. It does not claim to know what they were made from. It tells you there is reason to look closer.
The name is Finnish for “hidden potato”.
vehnäjauho, kasvirasva (rypsi), sokeri, muunnettu tärkkelysCheck, suola, nostatusaine (E500), aromi, E1442Check, emulgointiaine (soijalesitiini), väri (E160a).
Two words in this list could be potato. The package does not have to say either
way, so Piiloperuna brings them forward and leaves the decision to you.
Illustration. In the app, findings are shown on top of the photo taken of the package.
How it works
Three steps, and the list is read.
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Make a list for each person
Choose the ingredients Piiloperuna should look for. One list per person, and the lists stay on the phone.
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Aim the camera at the panel
Piiloperuna only reads once the whole ingredient list is in view. About half a list it says nothing at all.
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Look at what it points to
Words that were found are shown exactly as they were printed on the package, so you can check them with your own eyes.
A good hint, not a promise.
Piiloperuna cannot tell you for certain that a product is free of an allergen. It reads what is printed on the package, not what happened at the factory, and not what the manufacturer left unsaid.
When it finds something, it is telling you the product is worth a closer look. The final decision is made by a person.
- Avoid
- The word you are looking for was in the ingredient list as it stands.
- Check
- Something was found that could be it. The package does not have to say.
- Clear
- The whole list was read and nothing was found. Not the same thing as safe.
- Read again
- The whole list did not make it into the frame, so nothing can be concluded from it.
Privacy
The reading happens on your phone.
Ingredient panels are read on the device. Scan images are not sent to us, and your lists stay on your phone even when you share one with someone else.
Read the privacy policyDare to buy something else.
When reading the list no longer takes the whole shopping trip, the shelf holds more than the one familiar, safe thing.
Get it on Google Play