foodlifestyle

Recognize Healthy Food & Save Money on Groceries with Barcode Scanner Apps

Barcode Scanner Apps

Entering a huge shopping store every time when you need to get groceries can be overwhelming. You likely already know what you need to buy, but you also care about your health. The problem is, most of the time we can’t know for sure what we eat. Just because a package says “healthy”, that doesn’t mean it’s not loaded with sugar and other unhealthy ingredients. Additionally, going through the big list of elements you’re not sure what they mean isn’t the most efficient way to go either.

Thus, most people rely on the price tag to tell them if something is healthy or not. A $10 cereals must be healthier than a $1 cereals, right? Is it the same with expensive organic food? To try and help people solve this issue, we decided to check out apps that might help you detect healthier versions of the products you often buy. And so you don’t rely only on the price tag, we also wanted to find a sure alternative to checking prices.

Barcode Scanner Apps That We Found

After doing some digging, we stumbled upon a list of top barcode scanner apps. It ends up you can quickly find out a lot of things using one of the apps although they are all slightly different. Here’s the list we found if you want to check.

Top 10 Barcode Scanner Apps

To help you even further, we took a couple of them for a run at local stores and ended up picking our top 3 apps we think you’ll find useful.

QR & Barcode Scanner – Quick & Simple Price Finder

This app is as simple as the name. It quickly scans and provides information for any product you might find, ranging from clothes to food. It provides all the information you need like the price and product info for food. It basically feels like you’re having an entire inventory of products right in your pocket. Another neat feature is that the app saves everything you scanned previously.

So if you want to go and remind yourself where you searched for a specific food you really enjoyed and that isn’t price, you can just scroll through and get the information. This also allows you to easily compare price the moment you’re in Walmart or Target as all you have to do is scan products you want to compare and that’s basically it.

Since it also scans QR codes, we were a bit disappointed since a couple of times after scanning, the app simply provided an empty window. It might have something to do with the code itself but we can’t confirm that. Still, if it has something to do with the app, we’re sure it will be quickly fixed with an upcoming patch since the developers seem to be keeping the app active and running.

Lose It! – Scan & Eat Healthy

If you’re looking for an app to help you eat healthily or lose health but also has a scanner besides tracking your calorie intake, Lose It is a great choice. This highly popular app sports an intuitive scanner that searches their personal database of food, allowing you to easily check calorie information, ingredients, etc. After scanning, you can take it a step further and start creating your personal food library to ensure you filter out the food you enjoy eating.

This becomes quite helpful in longer runs because, after a month of using it, you’ll have a nice list tailored exactly to your needs. Finally, having everything an app can provide to help you lose weight in one place, Lose It is definitely a great pick.

If you decide to go deeper and precisely check the data you collected so far, you might need a couple of minutes to figure out how the app works in that department. It’s not that it’s extremely complicated, but we do feel the data interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly. As said, you’ll get used to it after a quick period, but the first encounter could be made a bit easier for somebody with a goal to live a healthier life.

Out of Milk – Made for Grocery Shopping

Finally, we felt we had to include an app that’s specifically for food shopping. The first app is a general scanner app perfect if you need to scan any product, but if you’re looking for one to help you do your weekly or monthly grocery shopping, Out of Milk is a fitting pick. What we love is the ability to combine scanned products and the shopping list feature.

For instance, instead of looking for a general milk product, you can easily check all packages available in a store and then pick the one that has the best price and fits your health needs. The polished-out interface makes it super easy to navigate the lists and categories you create, ensuring you don’t get lost even after adding dozens of products. It even allows you to categories eco-friendly product vs non-eco ones.

We didn’t have any issues in the first couple of weeks, but after creating a rich list of products and organizing them to fit our needs, we noticed that categories and products seem to reorganize on their own. For us, it didn’t play a huge role since every list was rather small, but we can imagine for someone who has a bigger list, this can create a bit of chaos.

Nevertheless, even if the list gets a bit jumbled, it’s still easy to check everything and it will make your shopping easier, cheaper and help you get better and healthier products.

Conclusion

So these are our top picks. Each app comes with an extra feature that some of you might find more useful. Depending on what you need the app for, be it to track your diet or simply to save money, we’re sure at least one of the reviewed apps will come in handy.

Be sure to test them out and see what works best for you.

If you end up not liking any of them, our final tip is to check the before-mentioned list where you’ll get more options and likely find the exact app you need. Good luck.

Clay Miller
the authorClay Miller
I am the creator/writer of Ways2GoGreen.com and Ways2GoGreenBlog.com. I'm an advocate for oceans, beaches, state parks. I enjoy all things outdoors (e.g. running, golf, gardening, hiking, etc.) I am a graduate of the University of Kentucky (Go Wildcats!!). I'm also a huge fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was born and raised in the beautiful state of Kentucky.

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