Baby tracker app flags allergens harder when product database has no data

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A solo developer spent 12 months bootstrapping a baby tracking app, BabyLedger AI, which has been live on the App Store since June. The app includes an allergen scanner designed to treat missing or unreadable product data as a warning signal rather than a clean bill of health. Unlike many barcode scanners that return 'no allergens found' for unknown products, this scanner escalates scrutiny — including reading multilingual label text — when database records are empty. The developer used Open Food Facts, a database of over 3 million products, as the barcode backend, alongside Expo/React Native, Supabase, and a server-proxied LLM. The core design philosophy prioritized safe failure modes from the start, treating incomplete data as a reason to alert users rather than silently pass a product as safe.

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