Fig App Reviews: Does This Food Scanner Deliver on Its Promises?

Fig and similar scanning apps promise to simplify grocery shopping by enabling users to identify avoided or incompatible ingredients and find suitable swaps. But is Fig comprehensive enough to help you develop healthier habits and an optimized lifestyle?

In this Fig app review, we examine the app’s core features, pricing transparency, potential shortcomings, and an alternative, Olive, with a broader approach to healthy living.

Fig Food App Review: What’s the Scanner?

Fig app (Food Is Good) was designed by a team of dietitians and engineers, many of whom live with food sensitivities or allergies and draw on personal experience when warning about or recommending ingredients or products. Fig’s main goal is to simplify shopping for people living with dietary restrictions, no matter how specific they may be.

Through your personal Fig profile, you can customize your dietary preferences, sensitivities, avoided ingredients, and food allergies on an ingredient-by-ingredient basis. The app offers a high level of customization, supporting numerous diets, including:

• Candida overgrowth
• GERD
• Gluten-free
• Lactose-free
• Low FODMAP
• Mediterranean diet
• Paleo
• Pescatarian
• Whole30

Due to its ingredient-based personalization, Fig claims to accommodate all food allergies, including egg, fish, shellfish, and wheat, as well as pollen food allergy syndrome (PFAS). The app also supports preference customization across 2,800+ ingredients, including added sugar, added salt, artificial flavors, capsaicin, sweeteners, and seed oils.

Fig evaluates ingredients with support from dietitians and community experts, linking them to different types of allergies, diets, and avoidances. When you scan a food item, the app compares your listed restrictions with the item's ingredient and allergen information and flags any incompatible components.

The app cannot promise absolute certainty, though. It advises users to carefully review product labels and contact restaurants or food manufacturers to confirm food safety, especially in cases of severe allergies or cross-contact risks. Fig positions itself as a guide for identifying foods likely to meet your requirements, rather than the only source of truth.

Bonus: See how Fig stacks up against the Yuka app in our detailed comparison.

How Your Fig Works

Your Fig is your personal profile, created by specifying three vital criteria:

1. Diets
2. Food allergies
3. Ingredient preferences or avoidances

Fig evaluates the compatibility of scanned items with your preferences. You can also manually search for foods that fit your profile through either the Fig app or its browser extension.

For even more relevant evaluation and recommendations, Fig allows you to set one of three severity levels for each restriction: preference, intolerance, and severe.

Preference means that you generally prefer to avoid an ingredient. Intolerance signals that you must avoid a certain ingredient, but cross-contact isn’t an alarming issue, whereas severe excludes both the presence of the ingredient and the possibility of cross-contamination.

Here’s how the Fig app treats ingredient ratings based on your selected severity levels:

The app draws information from food labels and restaurant websites and matches it against Your Fig. You can also tap the yellow and red ingredients to learn why they were flagged.

*Fig app uses a color-coded system to rate foods depending on their suitability for your dietary needs:

• Green check: No avoided ingredients were identified
• Yellow dash: Some ingredients may not fit your preferences
• Red X: Certain ingredients don’t fit your dietary needs

Fig’s Main Features

Check out Fig’s main features and functionalities in the following table:

*Available only through the paid Fig+ subscription.

Is the Fig App Legit?

Fig is a legitimate app available through the App Store and Google Play. It is, however, currently available only in the U.S. and is primarily designed for this market.

The app allows you to manually search for products that match your dietary preferences across many major grocery and specialty stores, including:

• Aldi
• Amazon
• CVS
• Central Market
• Key Food
• Metro Market
• Walmart
• Whole Foods

One detail that may cause some users to question the app is that the official price for the paid Fig+ subscription isn’t openly listed.

Fig’s pricing page only states that both annual and monthly subscriptions are available, describing the annual fee as approximately “the cost of a cup of coffee each month.” Fig+ is free for the first seven days, after which the subscription automatically renews annually unless canceled. The free version grants unlimited searches and five barcode scans per month.

Bonus reads: Explore our reviews and comparisons of other popular food-scanning tools:

• Yuka app reviews
• Yuka app alternative
• Bobby Approved app review
• Think Dirty vs. Yuka
• Yuka vs. Bobby Approved
• Yuka vs. EWG

Fig Reviews: Real-World User Impressions

The Fig app holds a 4.7-star rating on App Store, based on ~15,000 customer ratings. Many users share how the app has helped them shop more confidently, find alternatives that match their dietary profiles, and simplify life with food intolerances.

One user with IBS reported that, after years of struggling to research grocery items, they can now shop without stress. Another reviewer shared that they no longer feel anxious when visiting the grocery store because the app has helped them feel more empowered and informed.

In less-positive Fig app reviews, complaints cite reported inaccuracies, such as the app failing to filter out every product that contains a flagged ingredient. Another reviewer expressed dissatisfaction with the paid Fig+ subscription, noting that the app seemed more geared toward food allergies than intolerances, and that many products were flagged as unsuitable despite their set preferences.

Is Fig App Worth It?

Fig may be a viable choice for people with food allergies and dietary sensitivities, especially since its free version includes unlimited searches and five monthly scans. However, it’s designed to adapt food recommendations to dietary preferences and restrictions, not necessarily to support a broader clean-living approach.

Due to this high level of scrutiny, the app may automatically rule out foods that conflict with your profile, even when they wouldn’t generally be considered harmful or low-quality. The vague pricing policy may also be a deterring factor.

If you prefer a more comprehensive approach that evaluates ingredient quality from a scientific perspective rather than solely through a dietary lens, Olive may be a better fit. It’s a holistic health companion that supports clean-living choices and helps build sustainable habits.

Olive Helps You Build a Cart You Won’t Have To Question

In addition to barcode scanning and manual product search, Olive assigns each product an overall score from 0 (worst) to 100 (best). It also rates ingredients individually and provides plain-language, AI-backed explanations of each component’s potential health effects.

Olive’s scores are never influenced by paid collaborations or advertising. Its methodology is backed by independent laboratory findings rather than opinion-based or crowdsourced databases.

In addition to food evaluation, Olive encompasses personal care, cosmetics, water, and household products, supporting a multidimensional, whole-home clean-living approach. Here’s how Olive works in practice:

1. It helps you recognize the hidden enemies across your pantry, toiletry cabinet, and makeup and remove the load before you start rebuilding.
2. It guides you toward selecting healthier alternatives within the same category, while explaining why the swaps are recommended.
3. It offers personalized guidance for your sustainable weight loss and overall well-being through tailored peptide protocols and 1:1 health coaching.

Try Olive for free on iOS or Android. Your onboarding journey starts with the 28-Day Kitchen Detox, helping you create a clean slate for long-term change while gradually building healthier habits. You can use the barcode scanner to instantly inspect the products throughout your household and receive recommendations for cleaner alternatives. If you don’t notice a meaningful difference in how you and your family feel in 28 days, Olive provides a full refund.

Olive results include a user-friendly, color-coded per-ingredient rating: 🟢green for low risk, 🟡yellow for moderate risk, and 🔴red for high risk. This makes potentially harmful components easier to recognize.

Olive’s product analysis also incorporates independent laboratory testing for contaminants, including mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium, across 400+ products, resulting in a scope broader than Consumer Reports'.

Take this quick 5-minute quiz to try Olive for free.

This app completely changed how I grocery shop. I've been using Olive and it's honestly amazing! 🙌 It's completely changed how I shop. I can scan anything and instantly know what's really in it, without having to Google ingredients. As a mom, that peace of mind is everything. It makes grocery shopping so much easier, faster, and more intentional. I seriously don't shop without it anymore.

Chelsea.Mont

Change the way you shop

• Scan food, personal care and home products
• Independent scores backed by real lab testing
• Cleaner swaps for you, and everyone you shop for

Sign up for Olive

Featured image credit: Alive Color Stock via Shutterstock