Products Scanning App Reviews

I’m maintaining a list of other sites, apps and social media groups supporting the buy Canadian movement, most of which, like this site have sprung up in the last month. Today I’ve decided to do a review of the apps that either scan product barcodes or take a picture of product and tell the user if the product is Canadian or not.

I tested out six apps scanning the same six products each, sadly none of them were able to correctly identify if all products were made in Canada.

The best results came from Shop Canadian and OSCANada which both correctly identified 5 out of 6 products.

Shop Canadian incorrectly identified the final product as being fully Canadian despite being made in the USA by a Canadian company. In the case of the one error, I was able to use the app to report that the product was not made in Canada and on rescanning it now shows correctly. 5 out of 6 isn’t bad but most users will accept the wrong information and remember it, they aren’t going to check back on the same product in the future to see if the information is updated.

OSCANada wasn’t able to find any information on the same product that stumped Shop Canadian (none of the other apps had any data on it), which is much better than providing wrong information, but the app had other problems, it suggests non-Canadian alternatives to made in Canada products and has many ads which interrupt you while using the app.

Both BuyBeaver and RedLeaf were able to correctly identify 4 out of 6 products.

BuyBeaver couldn’t find anything on 2 products and provided correct information for the remaining 4 products which means it provided no false information. BuyBeaver also stood out because of its extremely fast scanning providing instantaneous results which would make it actually conceivable that shoppers would use it in the grocery store, though this might slow down under heavy user load.

RedLeaf was wrong about 1 product and couldn’t find one more, additionally the user input voting wasn’t working at time of testing.

CanBuy was right about 2 out of 6, providing wrong information about 3 products and having no data for 1.

MapleScan which admittedly was identified as a beta could not find any data about any of the 6 products, but I will say it had some funny jokes and cool scanning graphics.

Given the results above I put both Shop Canadian and BuyBeaver to a bit more of test. Shop Canadian did have data on most items I scanned some of which was wrong and often the information is quite vague. BuyBeaver had no data for quite a few products and for one product labelled Product of USA it reported as likely Canadian. For both apps users can add product ratings and information quite easily and the data quality should improve over time (though we need to keep in mind that users may also put in poor quality data).

At this point, I’m sorry to say that I can’t recommend any of the scanning apps for the use of consumers due to the tendency to provide false information. Those with user input options that are working fairly well like Shop Canadian and BuyBeaver should really be considered only for users that want to check data accuracy and fix mistakes. I understand that getting this data is quite challenging and these apps would provide a great way to create user populated databases that can eventually be used to help the average consumer buy Canadian made products, but they just aren’t ready yet.