A clean-label movement
Big Food is making us sick. Hold them accountable.
Ask Nonna reads any ingredient label and tells you, in plain English, whether it’s real food or ultra-processed factory chemistry. Every scan becomes a public record. Every brand gets graded.
Not a health app. Not a nutrition tracker. Just an easy way to find real food.
Why this exists
Real food shouldn’t be a luxury.
In most of the world, unprocessed food is unremarkable. Bread is flour, water, salt. Tomato sauce is tomatoes. Yogurt is milk. Ingredient lists fit on one line because they fit in a kitchen.
America did the opposite. Ultra-processed food dominates our shelves with dozens of additives banned across the EU, ingredient lists thirty items deep, and “natural flavors” that can legally mean a hundred different chemical compounds.
Ask Nonna runs one simple test on every product: would Nonna recognize this as food? If yes, we approve it. If no, we say so. No nutrition hand-waving, no health claims — just an honest read of what’s actually in the box.
How ingredients get rated
Real food
Recognizable. From a kitchen.
Caution
Modern, not traditional.
Industrial
Factory-only. Mamma Mia.
Every product rolls up to a binary verdict: Approvato or Mamma Mia.
Organic Ground White Corn Tortilla Chips by Trader Joe's
Simple ingredients for a tasty snack!
Approved1w agoOrganic Sugar Cones by TRADER JOE'S
Simple ingredients, classic flavors.
Approved1w agoCheesecake by TRADER JOE'S
Enriched flour and too many additives make this a no-go.
Flagged1w agoMoca Cookies by TRADER JOE'S
Too many industrial ingredients for Nonna's approval
Flagged1w agoChocolate Chip Cookies by Trader Joe's
Too many industrial ingredients for cookies
Flagged1w agoGREEN TEA ICE CREAM by TRADER JOE'S
Mostly real ingredients, but some oddities.
Approved1w agoVanilla Ice Cream Chocolate Wafer Cookies by TRADER JOE'S
Enriched flour and carrageenan make this dessert suspect.
Flagged1w ago
Share the verdict
Scan it. Share it. Make brands answer for it!
Every Ask Nonna verdict comes as a shareable card — built to be screenshotted, posted, and tagged. Brands count on shoppers staying quiet. Nonna makes silence the harder option.
Mamma Mia!
Call them out.
Spot a deceptive label? One tap. The verdict goes public, the brand gets tagged, and the call-out lives in the feed for everyone shopping that aisle.
Approvato!
Tell a friend.
Find a brand actually doing it right? One tap. Send it to a friend so they can shop with confidence too — real food is hard enough to find.
Wall of shame
The worst offenders.
The most-scanned products that wouldn't survive a single dinner with Nonna.
Nonna's picks
Real food, still on shelves.
Products with ingredient lists short enough to read out loud.
Personal · Public
Your pantry. Your record.
Every scan lands in your personal pantry — a private timeline of what’s been in your kitchen. Your public profile shows the rest: how many products you’ve checked, your approval ratio, who follows your finds, who you follow back.
Your pantry
Every product you’ve scanned, filtered by verdict. Approval ratio at a glance.
Your record
Public profile. Anyone can see what you scan, who you follow, and how often you find real food.
Recently scanned
Fresh from the aisle.
The latest products checked by the community.
Brand report cards
The brand spectrum.
A cross-section of 11 brands, from cleanest to most flagged.
The public ingredient record
1,207 ingredients analyzed across the U.S. grocery aisle.
Every scan adds to a permanent, searchable corpus. Every brand gets a report card. The database compounds.
How it works
Three steps. Ten seconds.
01
Scan
Point your phone at any ingredient label in the grocery store.
02
Analyze
Our AI checks every ingredient against what a traditional kitchen would recognize.
03
Decide
Get a clear verdict. Share it. The producer gets a public report card.
Stop guessing what’s in your food.
Ask Nonna is free and honest. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know the moment the iPhone app ships.
Daily verdicts. Wall-of-shame call-outs. Worst label of the week.