Does the thought of a three hour visit to the supermarket ploughing your way through endless ingredients lists only to find, right at the bottom, something that you cannot eat, depress you deeply? If so, you need Foodwise! Viv Hodgkiss and her vegan, IT specialist brother, James, have built a website, Foodwise, designed to take the sweat out of your shopping.

Foodwise allows you to set up a very detailed profile of your needs – not just your allergies and intolerances but your preferences for additive free, vegan, fair trade, organic, freefrom hydrogenated fats etc – and to specify whether these are absolute requirements or just preferences so as to widen the choice of foods on offer. You an also set up your preferred method of buying – major supermarkets, health food stores etc so that the programme can tell you whether your chosen product is available where you normally shop. To allow for family use, each copy of the programme allows you to set up four different profiles.

Once your profile is set up you can choose products from the 40,000 products available in the UK about which you can view everything you could ever need to know, including where you can buy it with a link to a website if it is available on line. You can also add it to your 'shopping list', ask to be sent an 'alert' if the product changes in any way and be sent an update when a new product appears in that category. If stuck for ideas the programme will also give you meal suggestions.

An added and very important feature, on which Viv and James are still working, will be the nutritional information available on each product and suggestions for nutritionally balanced meals.

And all of this for 99p a week (after a free 14 day trial) or only a mere 48p a week if you sign up for a year (total £24.99 including a 14 day free trial). In the long run, Viv would love to be able to offer the service for free as she feels that it would be so helpful for anyone on any kind of a restricted diet, whatever the reason. In fact, she has no dietary restrictions herself but James is vegan and their mother is coeliac so she understands all about restricted-diet shopping.

The idea for the site was originally James' who was frustrated by lack of choice for vegans and particularly by the poor nutritional choices he often ended up making for lack of knowledge or product availability – a problem which also faces make people on gluten or dairy-free diets. And it is James who has designed the site, working in conjunction with both the Anaphylaxis Campaign and the Vegan Society.

Foodwise has been set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company – 'a limited company created for the use of people who want to conduct a business or other activity for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage' – which is why Viv would like to be able, in the fullness of time, to provide their information free for all comers and is anxious to keep the price as low as possible meanwhile.

To find out more and to sign up for your 14 day free trial go to www.foodwise.org.uk – right now!

First published in 2010

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