SCANSMART
and the four delivery systems.

The “Tent”

Most food-tech companies are products with a brand attached. SCANSMART is built the other way round, an infrastructure with the products inside it. The I500 is the data asset at the centre; everything else is how that data reaches the people, institutions, and contexts that need it.

Delivery systems across three tiers

• Tier 1 (institutional): the I500 enterprise data licence; FLT, the professional Food Label Terminal
• Tier 2 (community): the I500 community-audit programme that builds the corpus, with shop-owner consent and trained local auditors
• Tier 3 (public): the CheckIT consumer scanner; the Weekly Supermarket Checkout, Decoded; the Knowledge Library; the I500 Shop Directory; CheckIT Stories. All free, all open, all reachable from this website

In development

Three further pathways are on the roadmap.

The Aisle Card NFC strategy

Tap your phone to an NFC shelf card in a partner shop and CheckIT opens with that product already loaded, no app to install, right at the moment and place of decision.

Online shopping integration

The decoded read from the shelf to the sofa: the same read you get holding the pack in the aisle, while you shop online with the major supermarkets, inside a native SCANSMART view.

The NHS HealthStore pathway

Carries the decoded read into the clinical-referral route, so a GP or care team can point a patient to it.

What we do not do

SCANSMART is not a medical device. We do not diagnose, prescribe, treat, or replace clinical advice. We are a food literacy and decision-support platform. CheckIT helps you read what’s in your shopping; it does not tell you what to do about it.

SCANSMART is not a paid-content gatekeeper for food data. The Weekly Supermarket Checkout, the Knowledge Library, the I500 Shop Directory, CheckIT Stories, and CheckIT are all free for everyone. Per our Belongs-to-Everyone Rule, the public-good substrate is genuinely public. Institutional revenue from the I500 enterprise licence is what funds the public substrate without depending on permanent grant support.

SCANSMART does not sell user data, run advertising, or take ad revenue. The website never has and never will carry third-party advertising.

Built in South London

SCANSMART was incorporated in February 2026, and the I500 community audit began the following month in South London independent shops. CheckIT went live at app.scansmart.uk on 22 April 2026, the Decision Record (the central data corpus that powers everything else) on 29 April 2026, and this website (v5.0 architecture) in May 2026.

SCANSMART Ltd. Co. No. 17128797. Registered in England & Wales.

Where it comes from: sixty years of the same work

A note from the founder.

In December 2019 I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and neuropathy. Almost overnight, food labelling came sharply into focus: what was really in the packaged food I was buying, and how much sugar was hidden inside it. After six years living with the condition, I decided to build something that could help me, and people like me, work out the sugar in packaged food at the moment it matters, standing in the shop, holding the pack.

As I worked through the research, the protocols and the design, I realised an alignment with what had gone before me. It wasn’t by design. It came from a simple fact: I had a condition that millions of others share, and I faced the same challenges they face. And as I built, I saw the line running straight back to my father and my uncle, decades earlier. My father, Courtney Laws OBE, ran the Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association from 1966 to 1996. My uncle, Dudley Laws, co-founded the Black Action Defence Committee in Toronto in 1988 and forced the creation of Ontario’s first independent police oversight body. Both of them spent their lives making visible to the authorities the people those authorities so often fail to see. I hadn’t set out to continue their work; I found myself doing the same thing, pointed at a different kind of invisibility.

What was unseen then is, if anything, more unseen now. In the digital age the obfuscation hasn’t gone away; it has moved, from plain neglect into the data. The truth about what we eat now hides in plain sight: in grams-per-100g a regulator can read but a shopper can’t, in additives logged by chemical name, in sugar disguised across sixty different words, in the databases and ranking systems that quietly decide what reaches us and what stays buried. The people overlooked before are overlooked again, by systems that are harder to see and harder to hold to account. SCANSMART points the same family instinct at exactly that: the manufacturers responsible for what goes inside the pack and what is printed on the back of it, and those whose job is to regulate them.

I wanted to build something that changes people’s lives without being a burden on those same people. That one decision shapes how the whole thing is funded.

The revenue comes from institutional partnerships, so the read from your shopping stays first-class for the person holding the scanner: ad-free, free of cookie tracking, and free of personal-data collection. Built in the digital age as a continuation of that family work, the infrastructure exists to help people improve their lives, and to make the manufacturers take notice.

Clive A Laws, founder, SCANSMART Ltd. London, 2026.

How to engage

Depending on who you are:

• Scan your shopping now: open CheckIT at app.scansmart.uk →
• You’re a retail intelligence buyer, FMCG manufacturer, or research organisation: the I500 page describes what we license and how to inquire
• You’re an NHS commissioner, GP network, school, council, community organisation, or foundation funder: our institutional enquiries page is the place to start a conversation
• You want to read what we publish: the Weekly Supermarket Checkout, Decoded updates Mondays; the Knowledge Library is the standing reference; the CheckIT Stories are real users telling their own decoding moments
• You want to support the work professionally: Subscriptions for journalists, researchers, dietitians, council policy officers (Subscription tier launches with v5.1 of the platform)
• You want to get in touch: contact form