Many people have various restrictions on their diets, and for this reason choose not to eat/drink/buy certain ingredients or types of food. For example, they may be vegetarians, vegans, suffer from allergies, or prefer organic products only. For this reason they have to be certain that the goods that they are looking at are free of the ingredients they don't want, or contain what they want. Although some companies have adopted standards to label certain items as suitable for vegetarians, preserve free, caffeine free, wheat free and so on, it is a challenging task for people suffering from less common allergies or sensitivities to food to go through the large choice of products in the market.

Thus, the aim of this project is to create a versatile and convenient service which the consumer can interact with to pinpoint the contents of products they are looking at. Ideally it should be accessible to as many people as possible. This means possibly utilizing various types of communication technologies to provide the user/customer a convenient access to this service. Ideally the service is provided in a media that the consumer already is likely to have. The implementation should be flexible enough to adapt to various means of communications, such as the internet/web, VoIP, SMS messages, and emails. For example, in the case of VoIP the user can access the service through a regular telephone, which may use voice recognition, or touch tone keys.

It may be the case that the customer would have to sign-up to the service in advance before they may be able to use it to its fullest extent. It is most likely that the service provided would be a subscription based service, in which case the customer customises the service according to their specific needs. Thus at the time of the users interaction with the service this data need not be gathered. The customer will most likely have to provide information such as the bar code of the item they are looking at, which uniquely identifies it. The customer will then get a response identifying the category or content they which to be flagged.

Although the vast number of products available may seem to make the idea of cataloging most of the products out there unscalable, I believe that there are many incentives for the use of this service. For example, one idea is that health conscious supermarket may adopt this service is order to attract more customers. In which case they may choose to use their own hand held devices that are freely available to their customers.

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