E-Codes Free: Food Additives dictionary for Android

By Martin Brinkmann on October 26, 2012 - Tags:Apps

Have you ever asked yourself why food often contains food additives indicated by e-codes on the packaging? This may be especially helpful when you are in a foreign country where different food additives may be used by the food industry or when you are very careful about what food you buy and eat. It is nearly impossible to known all the e-codes unless you are a chemist or someone who really needs to be very careful about food, for instance because of allergies or illnesses.

While you could carry a small notebook or book with you at all times to look up each e-code that you find on each item that you want to buy, you could instead use an app like E-Codes for that purpose. The main benefits here are twofold. First, it is likely that you carry your phone with you anyway, so that you can get rid of the notepad or book easily. Second, the search may speed things up a lot. Instead of having to find the right page that lists information about an e-code, you can simply type in the code to get results instantly on the screen.

The free version of the application can be used manually only. Just type in the code that you want to look up and information about the food additive are displayed instantly on the screen. Besides the name, you also get information about risks attributed to the additive. The risks are color coded and sorted by severity from top to bottom. You also find additional information about the additive, for instance what type of food additive it is, whether it is banned in a specific country or under which circumstances you should avoid eating food that contains the ingredient.

You can alternatively search for names instead of a code if you want to find out more about a particular additive type or only have the name at hand. The program supports the three languages English, German and Polish right now and requires a restart when you change the program language. A commercial version is available which adds star ratings to each additive which may help you when you need to find information fast. Still, the free version should be sufficient for most cases.