Why your calorie app can't find own-brand food (or the deli sticker)
You scan a supermarket own-brand yoghurt or a deli-counter sticker and get nothing. What those barcodes are, why big food databases miss them, and how to tell them apart in the shop.
You're in the kitchen with a supermarket own-brand yoghurt, you scan it, and the app has never heard of it. Scan a Coke straight after and it pops up in half a second. It isn't your phone, and it isn't bad luck.
The short version: there are two kinds of barcode the big food databases tend to miss. Own-brand products often carry a number the supermarket handed out itself, and the stickers from the deli counter or the fruit scale have the price or weight baked into the code, so they change every time. Ampsu handles both, and below is how to tell them apart while you're standing in the shop.
Why does a Coke scan when my own-brand yoghurt doesn't?
Most barcodes belong to whoever made the product. A manufacturer gets its numbers from GS1, the organisation behind barcodes, and the first digits show which country's GS1 office issued them: 400 to 440 for Germany, 474 for Estonia, and so on. Those products are sold everywhere, so their numbers end up in every database.
GS1 also keeps a block of numbers starting with 2 for restricted circulation: codes a retailer can hand out inside its own shops. Discounters use that block for their own brands on purpose, because those products never go through anyone else's till. Lidl's Eridanous Greek-style cheese, for example, is 20907785. A perfectly valid barcode, printed on the pack, and if a database was built mostly from big manufacturers and American products, it simply isn't in there.
And the sticker from the deli counter?
That's the other one. Cheese cut to order, meat from the counter, rolls you weigh yourself at the self-service scale: the shop prints a sticker, and the barcode on it holds the product and the price or weight of that one package. Same cheese, new barcode every time.
Every chain lays those codes out its own way, and nothing in the barcode says where the product number stops and the price starts. So no database will ever have them all, and an app can't safely guess.
Can I tell which one I've got?
Not from the digits, because both kinds can start with 2. The packet tells you, though:
- The barcode is printed on the packaging along with everything else, weight included: it's a normal product, just an own brand.
- It's on a sticker the shop printed, with a price and a weight: it's a weighed item, and the code will be different next time.
What Ampsu does about it
Ampsu's catalogue is built around European shelves, own-brands included, so plenty of these are already in it. When a scan of one of these codes still finds nothing, Ampsu asks you which kind it is.
If it's a normal product, you add it once with the numbers off the label, and it's there for everyone who scans that packet after you.
If it's a sticker, you tell Ampsu what it is once, and after that it recognises that sticker for you, whatever the package weighs. That one stays in your own account, since it's your shop's sticker and nobody else's.
What if it isn't found anywhere?
- Check the digits under the barcode. A crease or a smudge is enough to throw a scan off, so try again with the packet flat, or type the number in.
- Search by name. If you're in a hurry, the same food from another brand is usually close enough for one meal.
- Add it from the nutrition label. Then it's there the next time you scan it.