About Nime

Nime is a food intelligence app for European shoppers. Scan any barcode, and Nime translates the ingredient list into plain English, grades the product on four risk dimensions — additives, ultra-processed level, pesticides, and microplastics — and points you to better-scoring alternatives in the same category. The app is currently in pre-launch; iOS and Android versions will ship in 2026.

Why we built it

The back of a supermarket pack is harder to read than it should be. Even people who care about what’s in their food — parents managing allergens, shoppers reducing ultra-processed food, anyone trying to compare two yoghurts in the dairy aisle — run into the same wall: E-numbers without context, marketing claims that don’t reflect the ingredient list, and a Nutri- Score letter that captures one slice of the truth.

The European Food Safety Authority publishes additive evaluations. The French NutriNet-Santé cohort produces peer-reviewed research connecting specific E-numbers to health outcomes. EU regulation now formally requires applicants to consider mixture effects, the so-called cocktail effect, for new food-additive applications from July 2026. All of this is publicly available, and almost none of it is on the front of the pack.

Nime is the layer that sits between that research and the moment a shopper picks up a product. We don’t want to tell anyone what to buy. We want to make what’s actually in a product readable at the speed of a barcode scan, so the choice is yours, not the marketing department’s.

How we work

We publish the way we score in public. The full methodology pagedocuments how Nime grades each of the four risk measures, where the data comes from, what’s measured directly versus estimated, and where the limits are. If something there looks wrong, we want to hear about it — corrections and sourced challenges get read and actioned.

We also publish editorial content that walks through the underlying research, one category at a time. The Nime blogcovers food additives, ultra-processed foods, microplastic exposure, EU regulatory change, sweetener research, and the gap between what manufacturers claim and what’s on the ingredient list. Every post cites primary sources — EFSA, EUR-Lex regulation numbers, peer-reviewed journals like BMJ, PLOS Medicine, and The Lancet — and is deliberately conservative about distinguishing observational findings from causal claims.

The voice is plain-spoken, sourced, and sceptical of marketing rather than alarmist. Food science is genuinely uncertain in many places; we’d rather say so than overstate.

What we don’t do

Nime is a shopping companion, not a medical-grade diagnostic. We don’t replace dietetic advice from a qualified professional. We don’t detect contamination in individual products directly — microplastic and pesticide exposure risks are category-level estimates based on packaging type and published research, not lab-measured per-product values. We say this out loud in the app and on the methodology page, because the distinction matters.

We also don’t tell you which products are “good” and “bad.” The Harmfulness score is a research-aware read of how much concern the available evidence attaches to a product. Whether that maps to your shopping is a question only you can answer.

Privacy and data

Scan history stays on the device by default. We offer encrypted cloud sync for users who want it across devices, but it’s opt-in. We don’t sell personal data, ever — that is a hard product commitment, not a marketing line. Full details are on the Privacy Policy page.

Where we’re heading

Nime is pre-launch in 2026. We’re launching in five EU locales on dedicated domains — nimescan.com (EN), nimescan.nl (NL), nimescan.de (DE), nimescan.fr (FR), and nimescan.es (ES). The product database covers mainstream supermarkets in all five markets, and grows with user contributions.

You can join the early-access waitlist at /signup. Members get the full Nime Pro tier free during the launch window.

Contact

General enquiries via the contact form on the homepage. Press, partnership, and journalistic questions: press page. Methodology corrections or factual challenges with sources: we read every one.