Allergeneat is a mobile application aimed at making life easer for those people who are allergic to or have an intolerance of certain foods. There are some 14 allergens that the law obliges manufacturers to list on the labels of their products, but they often go unseen.
This app, created by Quim Sánchez and José María Falcón, works by scanning the barcodes of the articles to get a visual and intuitive result in less than a second. It has a database with more than 100,000 entries of brands available on the national market so that the technology can find the right one easily. All the user has to do is set up a profile and specify the products to which they are allergic or intolerant. Then all they have to do is scan the product’s barcode and in less than a second the word ‘suitable’ in green or ‘not suitable’ in red appears on the mobile’s screen. Thus, the time someone with allergies spends shopping is cut down considerably.
Sánchez: "We wasted a lot of time reading the labels on products”
The startup upgrades every month with 9,000 new entries. That makes it the leading app of its kind on the market, as the other applications have only a third of the number of references and in many of them it is the user who has to add them, reducing reliability.
The idea for Allergeneat came about a year ago when app creator Quim Sánchez’s partner was diagnosed with a number of food allergies. “From then on, going shopping became an odyssey, as we wasted so much time reading the labels on products,” he says. Then Sánchez, who is a telecommunications engineer, thought that a barcode reader could be the solution. “I became more convinced when I began to look into the subject and I found out that there are 12 million people in Spain with allergy and intolerance problems, and that the number is growing exponentially. So, I got working on an app that could help,” he says.
There are 12 million people in Spain with allergy and intolerance problems
Sánchez and Falcón presented the idea to the Yuzz startup accelerator of Banc Santander, and won first prize at Yuzz Sant Feliu 2017. The entrepreneurs have obtained 30,000 euros in seed money from a group of private investors and 400,000 euros from an initial investment round.