This post is also available in: 日本語
Need to know what’s in your food? Food Checker can help you!
“Food Checker” is the Japanese to English translation app for food labeling. It is designed for foreigners, especially for people who have diet restriction. Scan the barcode on a package and “Food Checker” app will translate it into English for you. List of ingredients will appear on your smartphone in a second!
1. About us
Member of “Food Checker” are doctoral students of Graduate school of Tokyo Institute of Technology and Hitotsubashi University. All of us are researching completely different fields (law, chemistry, meteorology and physics) but we are the members of “Academy for Global Leadership” (http://www.agl.titech.ac.jp/), the program specially designed for doctoral students, which is supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. As a part of the program, we had a chance to participate in “Lean Launch Pad (http://www.le-lab.jp/),” and it was when we started to develop “Food Checker” app.
2. Why we developed “Food Checker” app?
Tokyo Institute of Technology has many exchange students from all over the world. Ayako (one of the member of Food Checker) found out that exchange students are facing difficulty when they try to purchase food at the convenience store. Food labeling is written in Japanese and they had trouble finding out the ingredients of food. In order to purchase proper food, Muslim students had to ask Ayako or other Japanese students to go shopping with them or they simply gave up to try new products and stick to the ones they have purchased previously.
Ayako wanted to help her friends from abroad. After hours of discussion, our team came up with the idea: to develop a Japanese to English translation app that can solve such inconveniences. We believed that such app might be useful for Muslim students and it can help them to have better shopping experiences in Japan. Therefore, we’ve started a project “Food Checker”.
3. Functions of the app
After many interviews with foreign residents in Japan, we’ve reached the conclusion that it is important to have the function that “users can decide whether the food is appropriate or not”. It is very simple to use, once you start “Food Checker”, you can capture the barcode with you camera and the list of ingredients, translated into English will appear on the screen in a second. You can see the video of user story from following link:
http://foodchecker-web.sakura.ne.jp/homepage/home.html
Currently, the app is only available on iPhone.
4. Message to Muslim people
Thanks to enormous support from interviewees and mentors of Lean Launch Pad, we finally could release the app. However, our database does not have enough information of food items yet so we are trying to have more data available for the users of “Food Checker”.
Please download “Food Checker” app and “like” us on Facebook! We would like to hear from you, because your opinions will help us to improve the app. We appreciate your continuous support and hope you could share this article with your friends!
You can download “Food Checker” from here:
https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/foodchecker-b/id950269870?mt=8
Find us on Facebook! :
https://www.facebook.com/foodchecker?fref=ts
Thank you and hope you will enjoy shopping with “Food Checker”!
