Lactose.help
Lactose.help is a mobile app and companion book that empowers lactose-intolerant people to shop and eat with confidence. Scan any product barcode with your phone and instantly get a clear color-coded Lacto-Score (A to E) telling you whether it's safe, risky, or to be avoided. No more guessing, no more stomach aches. The app uses AI-powered ingredient analysis and covers thousands of products. Born in Brussels, the project includes a practical guide book explaining how to find your personal tolerance threshold, revealing that up to 76% of EU PDO cheeses can be enjoyed by most lactose-intolerant people. Come discover the app live, scan products at our booth, and reclaim your food freedom!
Gauthier de Valensart
Gauthier de Valensart has been lactose intolerant for 10 years. An engineer by training, author of the book "Mieux vivre avec son intolérance au lactose" and co-founder of the mobile application lactose.help, he developed a practical label-reading method to instantly assess the maximum lactose concentration of food products in the supermarket. His mission is to help lactose-intolerant people better understand and enjoy their diet. With the right strategies, dishes like yaourt, cheese and wine, raclette, fondue, tartiflette, and mont d'or are not a problem.
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https://www.lactose.help
What inspired you to make this project?
I was frustrated by having to give up the dairy products I loved. I dug into the subject and discovered several strategies to make the most of my diet. I wanted to share this knowledge with other lactose-intolerant people through a book and automate the method to determine the maximum lactose risk from a simple barcode. When a product is not found in the database, an AI-powered image analysis is performed to evaluate its composition.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered and how did you address them?
Two big challenges stood out. First, I'm an engineer, not a doctor : so when I wrote a book covering medical aspects of lactose intolerance, I made sure every health-related section was reviewed and validated by certified dietitians.
Second, the app's barcode scanner had to work reliably across a huge range of phones on both iOS and Android, each with different cameras, autofocus speeds, and lighting quirks. That alone was a significant engineering effort. But the real headache came when a scanned product doesn't exist in the Open Food Facts database. In that case, the app asks the user to photograph the ingredient list and runs an AI-powered analysis and real-world photos are messy. Blurry shots, poor lighting, reflections on plastic packaging… getting the AI to return accurate results from that kind of input took months of development and fine-tuning. Once validated, we contribute the enriched product data back to Open Food Facts, staying true to the collaborative spirit of the open-source project that makes our app possible.