I thought I was doing everything right—eating a clean diet, getting solid sleep, and hitting my macros. But I still felt off. Bloated gut. Insomnia. Random hyperactivity. Then one day I flipped over the box of Allegra I was taking daily... and boom: 15+ “inactive” ingredients I couldn’t pronounce.

The next hour? Me, hunched over my laptop, Googling each chemical like a lunatic. Colloidal silicon dioxide. Magnesium stearate. Pregelatinized starch. Titanium dioxide. Iron oxide. Hypromellose. Macrogol 400. Stuff that’s banned overseas—hidden in everything from protein powders to allergy meds to “clean” skincare.

That’s when the lightbulb exploded.
This shouldn’t be so difficult.

So I built Cornstarch—a real-time AI scanner that instantly decodes ingredients in plain English. Just point your phone at any label (food, supplements, medicine, skincare, or even pet food) and get a plain-English, color-coded breakdown of what’s inside—good, bad, and sketchy. It flags allergens, highlights synthetic vs. natural ingredients, and shows FDA and EU approval status—but that’s just the start. Cornstarch also breaks down each ingredient’s effects, purpose, origin, and any warnings for sensitive groups (like pregnant individuals or those with skin or neurological conditions).

Fast, private, easy to understand. No PhD required.

Under the hood, Cornstarch utilizes real-time computer vision (Swift ML Vision Library/OCR) to read ingredient labels and a uniquely crafted, custom-tuned LLM engine (LPU™) explicitly designed for ingredient decoding. Every scan runs through a tailored query built for clarity, safety, and precision—no barcodes, no static databases, no hallucinations. Just fast, context-aware insights. Whole different game.

I’m not a guru. I’m a slightly unhinged software guy who got tired of guessing what I was putting in my body. I just wanted to protect myself, my friends, and my family.

Now, hundreds of people are scanning everything from energy drinks to vitamins and DMing me, “Look what I found?!”

We launched on r/iosapps and Product Hunt, received a ton of feedback, and built allergy filters, improved speed, and enhanced detection.

Try us out, and let me know what you think! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cornstarch-product-scanner/id6743107572