What vitamins and minerals are in a scanned product? What your app doesn't show

You scan the barcode on a yoghurt, a loaf of sliced bread or a box of cereal, and the app gives you calories, fat, carbs, sugars, protein and salt. What about iron, magnesium, folate or vitamin D? In most apps, nothing: a scanned product goes into your diary with no vitamins or minerals at all. Here is why, what each app shows for a scanned product, and what vitaloop, a nutrition app made in Barcelona, does about it. We make vitaloop; everything we say about other apps comes from their own websites and help centres, with a link.

How much of what you eat comes in a pack?

More than you might think. Ultra-processed food — pastries, cured meats, soft drinks, ready meals, many cereals and sliced breads — makes up about 25% of the energy adults in Spain eat, according to the ENALIA2 survey, and between 14% and 44% across the 22 European countries studied (Mertens, Colizzi and Peñalvo, European Journal of Nutrition, 2022). And the trend is upwards:

• In the Spanish DRECE cohorts, its share of the diet went from 24.4% in 1991 to 31.1% in 2008 (DRECE study).
• In Spanish households' food shopping, it went from 11.0% in 1990 to 31.7% in 2010 (Latasa et al., European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2018).

And that is only ultra-processed food. Jarred pulses, plain yoghurt, tinned fish and milk carry a barcode too. There is no published figure for how much of what people log in these apps goes through the scanner, so we won't make one up. But if your diary looks anything like your shopping basket, a good part of it does.

What the label says, and what it leaves out

Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 requires seven values (art. 30(1)): energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt. Vitamins and minerals are optional, and can only be declared when the product provides a “significant amount”: as a rule, 15% of the nutrient reference value (NRV) per 100 g, or 7.5% per 100 ml for drinks (Annex XIII).

The result is that most packs say nothing about micronutrients, even when the food contains them. A product can give you a little iron, magnesium and folate at once without any of them reaching the threshold. We go into more detail in why the label only shows 7 nutrients.

An app that only reads the label inherits its silence: in your diary, the vitamins and minerals of what you scan don't exist. That is not a guess. One study scanned 100 Dutch products in seven apps: MyFitnessPal reached at most 16 nutrients, Yazio and Virtuagym 4. The authors concluded the apps were less suitable for assessing diet at the nutrient level (Maringer et al., Public Health Nutrition, 2019).

What each app shows for a scanned product

These are the apps with a barcode scanner that come up most when people look for a way to track what they eat.

• Cronometer has a free scanner. A scanned branded product carries its label's nutrients: in its own example, a branded Brazil-nut entry lists 17 nutrients and the generic lab-analysed entry 76. The same page advises avoiding the scanner when micronutrients matter. Its “Better Alternative” feature fills missing nutrients from a similar generic food, not from the specific product.
• MacroFactor has a scanner. Its help centre explains that most branded products don't report in-depth micronutrients, so they “will likely be undercounted”, and advises logging common foods instead.
• MyFitnessPal has had its scanner in Premium only since October 2022 (its Premium page). What it shows are label values or values submitted by its community.
• Fitia has a scanner and, according to its blog, tracks 12 vitamins and 9 minerals and estimates missing micronutrient data, without saying whether that covers scanned products.
• Cal AI scans barcodes, and its website talks about calories, protein, carbs and fat.
• Yuka scans for free but keeps no record of what you eat: it gives a score from 0 to 100 weighted on Nutri-Score (60%), additives (30%) and whether it is organic (10%).

What vitaloop does with what you scan

You scan the barcode, as in any other app. The difference is on the product sheet: on top of what the label declares, vitaloop's nutrition intelligence system estimates its vitamins and minerals, including the ones the manufacturer doesn't have to declare. So when you log that yoghurt or that sliced bread, its iron, calcium and folate count towards your daily totals, alongside everything else you eat.

• Marked as estimates.The sheet tells you these vitamins and minerals are estimated. It is not a lab analysis of the product, and we don't present it as one.
• No filler numbers.When the system can't estimate them reliably, it doesn't show them. We would rather leave a gap than show a number we can't stand behind.
• Against European reference values.Your totals are compared with EFSA reference values for your age and sex, not with the label's one-size NRV.

So the iron in your week no longer depends on whether your food came loose or in a pack. To see how that figure gets used, read which app calculates the vitamins and minerals in what you eat and, one nutrient at a time, how much iron you need a day.

Is vitaloop for you?

If you want to know which vitamins and minerals you get from the packaged food you buy too, see your totals against European reference values for your age and sex, and understand the patterns in your own data, vitaloop is for you.

vitaloop works in English, Spanish and Catalan, and is free to download from the App Store and Google Play, for iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. The barcode scanner is free.