u/SnooCrickets3132

Continuation of the plantspack (the vegan directory platform I'm building) updates.
We've added a tool list and here is an honest state of each.

https://plantspack.com/tools, web for now (app in the making), no login needed unless noted below:

• Food barcode scanner. Point phone at a barcode, get vegan / not vegan / unknown. Backed by Open Food Facts (community-built, CC-BY-SA). Strong for mainstream EU products, weakest for store-brand items. Returns "unknown" honestly instead of guessing.
• Cosmetics barcode scanner. Same flow, backed by Open Beauty Facts. Smaller database, more "unknowns." Important: this checks for animal-derived ingredients (lanolin, carmine, beeswax, silk, snail mucin) - NOT animal testing just yet.
• Ingredient label scanner. Photograph the back of a packet, animal-derived ingredients get flagged including the sneaky ones (lactoserum, casein, shellac, carmine). Uses OpenAI vision under the hood, which costs real money per scan, so: 1 scan free as a guest, 3/month signed in, supporters get unlimited up to the end of my budget 😂. Only paywalled mechanic on the site.
• Menu scanner. Photograph a foreign-language restaurant menu, vegan + adjustable dishes flagged. Same quota as the ingredient scanner.
• Drinks lookup. Beer, wine, spirits, ciders, liqueurs. Curated against manufacturer statements + Vegan Society / V-Label certifications + historical Barnivore data. Deliberately small and reliable rather than an auto-imported list with stale claims. No login.
• Printable cards. Restaurant cards in 20+ languages, plus an E-number guide and a hidden-ingredient cheat sheet. Print or save as PDF. Deterministic, no AI, no login, no limit.
• Baking substitutes + substitute finder. Curated reference (egg replacements, dairy replacements, etc). Small but accurate.
• Impact calculator. Animals not slaughtered, CO2 not emitted, water not used over your vegan years. Based on peer-reviewed sources (Poore & Nemecek 2018, Scarborough 2023). Shareable card.
• Scan history. Signed-in only. Saves your barcode + ingredient + menu scans (calculator results aren't saved) so you can revisit something you scanned weeks ago.

All data sources are linked on the tools hub page.

I'm also trying to incorporate allergen filters across the scanners, so you can enter your allergies and results should be adjusted accordingly, but I do not have any allergies that I'm aware of, so it's not well-tested yet -> looking forward for any feedback.

Tie to the rest of the site: tools sit next to the 54k-place vegan directory, so "is this safe to buy" and "where do I eat" share one URL. That's the only pitch this time.

I run plantspack with my wife, no ads, no investments - same one from previous posts.
What's missing from this list? What else would make you join our small community?

I run a small free vegan directory as a side project, and this week I went through every "fully vegan" listing for Belgium I could find. Cross-checked HappyCow, the visit.brussels list, the travelersanddreamers Leuven guide, The Bruges Vegan blog, Yelp, Resto.be, Greenplace.today, and the venues' own websites. Goal was to confirm which places are actually 100% vegan, currently open, and have a real address.

A few things I didn't expect:

1. Ostende and Charleroi have zero 100% vegan venues.
2. Leuven punches massively above its weight. Population ~100k, but four fully vegan venues: Life Bar, Het Strand, Tabi Loo, and Pepas. Pepas is Belgium's first fully vegan frituur (their words: "de eerste volledig veganistische frituur in België"), which I didn't know existed. Per capita, Leuven has more 100% vegan options than Brussels does.
3. The 100% vegan map of Belgium is heavily Flemish. Out of 81 fully vegan venues I could verify across the country, the Flemish region holds the strong majority. Wallonia outside Liège is almost empty: Mons, Tournai, Namur, Charleroi together have ~2 fully vegan venues. Whether that's a market-demand thing or a not-yet-built thing, I don't know, but it's striking how sharp the divide is.
4. About a third of "fully vegan" entries on third-party lists are now wrong.
5. Brussels' vegan density is in Saint-Gilles, not Brussels-1000. Archie, Lazlo, L'Alchimiste, Mo Mo, TerTer, Taylor's are all clustered in the 1060 postal code. If you stay in the city centre you'll think Brussels has fewer vegan options than it does - Saint-Gilles is where the cluster actually lives.

Posting this here mainly because I think the data points might be useful for anyone planning a trip or doing a similar audit. The directory itself is at plantspack.com if you want to poke around - it's free, ad-free, no affiliate links. If you spot something I have wrong (closed venue, wrong level, missing place) let me know in the comments and I'll fix it.

P.S. there is a big chance i'm missing some great places, so looking forward to any feedback and contributions.