App for reading barcodes from food for nutritional information

[mstevens]

Interesting.

There's no nutritional information stored in product barcodes, so the application must be using them to identify the product then searching a database for nutritional information that matches that product and returning that.

I have to ask: why not just go by the nutritional information printed right on the packaging? That's where you're finding the barcode, and it's going to be more accurate since there's far less chance of a mismatch between the product and the nutritional information. I can't imagine there are any products that don't have a nutrition label but do have a barcode and for some reason have accurate nutritional information in a database somewhere.