Review Process
How products enter our database, how we verify the data, and what happens when something doesn't look right.
How products are added
Products enter the Trulu database through three channels:
Automated scraping
We continuously monitor publicly available product listings from major Australian retailers. New products and formulation changes on local shelves are detected automatically and added to a processing queue.
Open Food Facts
Barcode lookups are cross-referenced against the Open Food Facts database, providing an additional data source for ingredient lists and nutritional panels.
User-submitted scans
When a user scans a barcode not in our database, the product enters a processing pipeline where its ingredient list and nutritional panel are extracted and scored. High-confidence data goes live; lower-confidence or flagged items are queued for review.
Processing steps
Every product passes through a multi-step pipeline:
- Data extraction — ingredient lists and nutritional panels are extracted from product images or retailer data using AI-assisted parsing, then cleaned and normalised.
- Ingredient matching — each ingredient is matched against our ingredient database. Unrecognised ingredients are flagged for review.
- Scoring — the product is scored across all four dimensions (ingredient quality, additives, nutrition, processing). Scores that fall outside expected ranges for the category are flagged for review.
- Triage & review — flagged items are prioritised for manual checks by the Trulu team. High-confidence data goes live automatically; lower-confidence or flagged items queue up for a closer look.
Honesty about scale
We want to be straight with you. Trulu is built and maintained by a small Australian team managing a database that's growing by the day. We do everything we can to keep scores fair and accurate, but at this scale it isn't realistic for a person to manually inspect every product before it goes live.
That's why our pipeline leans on automation for the heavy lifting and prioritises human review where it matters most - flagged items, edge cases, and high-impact categories. Errors will happen. When they do, we want to know about them quickly so we can fix them.
The community keeps it accurate
A project of this scope only really works with help from the people using it. If you spot an inaccurate score, missing ingredient, out-of-date label, or anything that doesn't look right, please use the Report an issue or Send feedback buttons in the app. Every report gets reviewed and we do our best to get it corrected.
The more eyes on the database, the better Trulu gets for everyone. See our corrections policy for how we handle reports, or email team@trulu.app directly.