Chile’s OK to Shop, the application for finding the right food in a supermarket

Contxto –  Are you really gonna eat that? A Chilean entrepreneur wants to ensure consumers are certain that the food they buy at their local supermarket matches their dietary needs. For this reason, he’s developed OK to Shop.

This mobile application displays a product’s ingredients, certifications, among other useful bits of information.

That way, consumers know whether a product really is ok to eat.

Lifestyles that need information

Dietary restrictions such as taking up a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle are increasingly commonplace. Likewise, people watch what they eat for health-related purposes or religious ones.

Whatever the reason, something these consumers have in common is the need for more information regarding the items they find in a supermarket. 

However, this data isn’t always very visible, as Chilean Sebastián Wilson realized one day while doing some shopping.

He’d picked up vegetable soup, thinking it was vegetarian. But upon closer inspection of the label, Wilson realized it contained chicken broth.

That was a no-go. And he realized that there were probably other consumers facing similar scenarios and he wanted to offer them a solution

Ok to shop (and then eat)

OK to Shop harbors a database of over 13,000 products according to its website and reportedly, more are added weekly.

All a user needs to do is download the app and register their dietary restrictions. And as they go about the supermarket, they can pull out their phone and using the application, scan a product’s barcode.

From there, the system displays a list of its ingredients, whether it’s really gluten-free, etc. OK to Shop also highlights restricted ingredients in red on the list to warn the consumer.

In addition, it can recommend products that are similar or fit the person’s diet.

OK to Shop also functions as a collaborative tool, so users can log food items that weren’t previously registered, onto the database. 

The new products a user adds are validated by nutritionists and other relevant food-industry authorities. This helps to assure that what a user uploads as “kosher,” for example, really is kosher.

While OK to Shop sounds appealing for the growing market of eco-conscious consumers. It’s probably a bigger game-changer for those who suffer from allergies or diabetes as the type of information the app provides can make a life-or-death difference.

-ML