Etiqa 1.1 — full nutrition labels & ingredient insights in Spanish
Our first update since launch is rolling out on the App Store. The headline: product pages got a major upgrade — a complete nutrition facts label, tap-to-explore ingredients, and insights that finally speak Spanish, which is what most labels on Panama shelves are written in.
Get the update on the App Store →
What's new
- Full nutrition facts label — product pages now show the complete, familiar nutrition panel (calories, fats, sodium, carbs, sugars, protein and more) instead of a partial chart, with a line stating whether values are per serving or per 100 g.
- Tap-to-explore ingredients ("What's Inside") — every ingredient appears as its own chip with a green, red, or gray dot. Tap a flagged ingredient and a plain-language card explains why it's considered harmful or beneficial.
- Ingredient insights now work in Spanish — the ingredient checker previously struggled with Spanish-language labels, which meant many local products showed no insights at all. That's fixed: it now reads the labels Panama actually shops.
- Health flags, separated — nutrition warnings like "high sodium" now live in their own Health Flags list instead of being mixed into the ingredients.
- Tap-to-zoom product photos — product images open full-screen so you can read the label up close.
- Offline banner — the app now tells you when you've lost connection instead of silently showing stale or empty screens.
Improvements
- Faster search — a database fix made fuzzy product search noticeably faster. (This one already went live for everyone on July 8, server-side.)
- Barcode scanning finds more products — barcodes printed with or without leading zeros now resolve to the same product, so fewer "not found" results on valid barcodes. (Also already live for everyone.)
- Cleaner score display — the product page's score section was streamlined as part of the redesign. Your scores and grades are unchanged — the EtiScore methodology wasn't touched in this release.
- Polish — a branded loading spinner, smoother home-screen carousels, and a Spanish email placeholder (nombre@ejemplo.com) on the sign-in form.
Fixes
- Ingredient insights showed nothing (all-gray chips) on most local products — the checker was silently failing on Spanish labels.
- Ingredients could be flagged incorrectly when a short word appeared inside a longer one — for example, sal (salt) matching inside salvado (bran). Matching is now whole-word.
- On the web app, the back button on a product page could fail to navigate.
- Products submitted via label photo could be wrongly rejected when a brief network hiccup occurred during processing.
Under the hood
- Our ingredient knowledge base grew from 49 to 57 entries, adding sugar, palm oil, hydrogenated oils, caramel color, artificial flavor, almonds, walnuts, and inulin. Every entry is now fully bilingual, with descriptions backed by FDA, WHO, and IARC sources.
- Barcode handling now normalizes to the standard 14-digit GTIN form, improving scan hit-rates across differently printed barcodes.
Known limitations
- Products without ingredient text on file fall back to a simpler "Limited data" view — ingredient insights depend on label data quality, and our coverage keeps improving.
- Some nutrition panels show values per 100 g or per estimated typical serving rather than the package's own serving size; the label always discloses which basis is used.
- You may occasionally see duplicate product listings while we continue catalog merging work.
- Etiqa is iOS-only for now.
What's next
Android is on the roadmap — join the notify list and we'll email you the day it ships. And the Panama catalog keeps growing: more products and broader supermarket coverage are a constant, every week.