Built by someone doing
the same checking.
NibbleCheck comes out of real family experience: managing more than one child, with different allergies, doing the same supermarket arithmetic over and over.
Help families make safer food decisions with confidence.
Note the word: safer. Not safe. We will never tell you a food is safe for your child, because a label cannot tell us that — it says nothing about the line it was made on, or what was made there before it. What we can do is read the label faster and more thoroughly than anyone can standing in an aisle, tell you clearly what it says for each child, and be honest about how much that is worth.
Our aim is to be the tool a parent reaches for without thinking about it, and trusts precisely because it does not overstate what it knows.
The problem we started with
Parents and carers of children with food allergies make the same high-stakes decision over and over: can this child eat this product? The process is slow, repetitive, error-prone and mentally exhausting.
It gets harder with more than one child. Take two, which is where this started. One reacts to pea protein — increasingly common in vegan and high-protein foods, and not one of the fourteen allergens UK law makes a label call out. The other reacts to milk, wheat and egg. A single jar in your hand needs two separate readings of the same small print, and the answer for one child tells you nothing about the other.
Do that for a trolley of food, with a toddler, in a shop that is about to close. Then do it again next week, because the recipe may have changed and nobody tells you when it does.
Parents do not need more information. They need faster, clearer decisions. That is the whole of it.
What we believe
Four ideas that decide how NibbleCheck behaves whenever there is a judgement to make.
Families think in households
Not in individuals. Nearly every allergy app checks a product against one person. Real shopping is one product against everyone at the table.
Confidence beats false certainty
A clear answer you can't trust is worse than an uncertain one you can. Every verdict says how sure we are, and why.
The overlooked allergens matter
Milk, wheat and egg are well covered by other tools. Pea protein is not, and it is turning up in more foods every year. We track 28 allergens, not 14.
The packaging is the final authority
Always. NibbleCheck is there to make reading it faster and to catch what is easy to miss — never to replace it.
Honesty, built into the machinery
Being careful about wording is easy. We wanted the caution to be structural — rules the app cannot talk itself out of on a bad day.
- A reassuring result can never be our highest confidence. High confidence is reserved for findings. We can be certain we found something; we can never be certain there is nothing there.
- Reassurance fades with age; warnings never do. Recipes change and nobody announces it, so an old “nothing found” loses confidence over time. An old warning keeps every bit of its weight.
- Nothing about the decision is guesswork by a language model. Matching is deterministic and inspectable: the same product and the same profile always produce the same answer, and we can tell you which words caused it.
- Community labels are checked before they count. A label from another family only affects results once several families, in different households, agree on it (and agreement can never take away an allergen the product’s own data declares), or once we have checked it against its photo ourselves.
- Never tell you a product is safe
- Never call a food “allergy-free” or approved
- Never give medical advice, or replace it
- Never diagnose anything
- Never put a child's allergy result behind a payment
- Never sell or share your family's data
We checked the ingredients list — it can't tell you about shared equipment. Read the packaging too.
One person, in the UK
NibbleCheck is built by Oliver Kirkman, a sole trader in the United Kingdom trading as NibbleCheck. Not a company, not a team, not backed by anyone — one person building the tool he wanted to exist, with design help brought in where it is needed.
That is worth knowing for two reasons. It means the person reading your feedback is the person who writes the code, so if something is wrong you can tell us and it can change. It also means we are small: we are careful about what we promise, and we would rather ship less and be right about it.
Built for UK shoppers, on UK labels: the fourteen allergens the law requires on a label are the floor rather than the limit, and food alerts come straight from the Food Standards Agency.
Say hello, or tell us what is missing: [email protected].
We're not launched yet
NibbleCheck is in development, being tested with real families before it goes any further. If you look after a child with allergies, the most useful thing you can do is tell us what would actually help.
Join the waitlist