Allergies, and what the verdicts mean

Read this part first

Orsola will never tell you a food is safe. It reports what an ingredient list says, and how far that goes — no further. The package in your hand is the authority, every time, and that is true even when the card looks reassuring.

This matters most where it is easiest to skim: a recipe changes, a factory line changes, a database is out of date by a week. Orsola cannot see any of that. You can.

The four verdicts

Why "not listed" is not "safe"

Not listed means Orsola read an ingredient list and your allergen was not in it. It tells you nothing about what the pack in front of you says today, what the line it was made on also makes, or whether the list it read is current.

The card says which source it used and when it was read, so you can judge how much weight to give it. A missing, unreadable or out-of-date ingredient list is reported as Unknown — never as an absence of the allergen.

Setting your allergies

Under Settings, in Allergies and diet. The list you are offered depends on the country you chose when you set Nutrition up, because the two countries require different allergens to be declared.

Anything outside that list goes in Anything else to avoid? as free text — kiwi, celery, a particular additive. Orsola matches those against ingredient lists in the same way.

Diet, which is a different thing

Alongside the allergens you can set diet rules — vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher, gluten-free, lactose-free, no pork, no alcohol, no beef. These shape what Orsola suggests and flags.

Keep the distinction in mind: an allergen is checked against the ingredient list on a specific product, while a diet rule is a preference Orsola works to. If something matters medically, set it as an allergy, not as a diet.

If you are not getting a verdict

Two common reasons. The product is not one Orsola knows, so there is no ingredient list to check — photograph the label and it becomes your own food, with a real list behind it. Or the label photo cropped the ingredients, so only the nutrition panel was read.

Scan a product or read a label covers both.

Where to go next

Your settings, and your nutrition data is where the allergen list lives, along with everything else you can change.