The food data the major databases systematically miss.
The Independent 500 (I500) is a community-audited corpus of products from independent UK shops — halal, Caribbean, South Asian, kosher, West African, East African, Latin American, vegan-specialist, and refill stores. The products that don’t appear in Open Food Facts. The products Tesco and Sainsbury’s data feeds don’t cover. The products real households in real neighbourhoods actually buy.
An evidence base built where the data is missing.
Open Food Facts is the world’s leading open food database — 4M+ products. ScanSmart uses it as the primary backbone of the KiP scanner. But OFF coverage drops sharply at the independent-shop tier, especially for cultural-specific products that mainstream supermarkets don’t stock. For high-diabetes postcodes in South London where Caribbean, halal, and South Asian groceries are the daily reality, OFF can have less than 30% coverage on what’s actually in someone’s shopping basket.
The I500 fills that gap. Trained community auditors visit independent shops with shop-owner consent. Each product is scanned, photographed (with permission), label-decoded, traffic-light-rated, and added to the I500 corpus. By month 12 of operation, the I500 is the most complete dataset of independent-shop food in the UK that exists anywhere.
Already shipping
The I500 v1 corpus carries 130 verified SKUs across South London independent shops as of April 2026. Year-1 target: 1,000 products. Long-term ceiling: 2,000–2,500 genuinely under-represented SKUs.
Not a sub-set of OFF
The I500 is the complement to OFF, not a duplicate. Every product in the I500 is verified as not in OFF or insufficiently labelled there. Halal-certified products, Caribbean staples, South Asian household basics, kosher-specific, West African groceries.
Trained local auditors
Audits performed by trained community members, not contractors flown in. Per Bible §13.2 Moat 5, the auditor network is the trust layer the data inherits from. Shop owners give explicit consent via the Shop Participation Agreement (Appendix B).
Live in the consumer scanner
Every I500 product is queryable via the KiP app at app.scansmart.uk. When a shopper scans a barcode that’s in the I500 but not in OFF, the I500 result is what they see. The hit rate is measured per the v4.10 Decision Record (live since 29 April 2026).
Behavioural signal layer
Beyond the product corpus, the I500 carries the Decision Record — the anonymous record of what shoppers tap when they see each product (Bought / Put back / Just looking). This is the put-back-pattern evidence base for behavioural intervention research.
Six dimensions of intelligence
The I500 is layer 1 of ScanSmart’s Six Layers of Intelligence Stack — product corpus, decision record, traffic-light verdict, profile-tuned thresholds, alternative-finding (SaK), audit-evidence (per Competitive Positioning Report v1.3).
Five categories of buyer.
- Retail intelligence platforms — Mintel, Kantar, Nielsen IQ. The I500 is the data they don’t have because their methodology doesn’t reach independent shops.
- FMCG manufacturers — brands wanting to understand the cultural-specific market they currently can’t see. Halal-certified yogurt, Caribbean sauces, South Asian flours.
- NHS commissioners + public-health teams — borough-level diet evidence for high-diabetes, high-hypertension postcodes. The I500 is the dataset for the conversation a council’s diabetes prevention team needs to have with the local independent grocers.
- Academic researchers — nutrition, behaviour change, food-systems research. The I500 is the evidence base for studies that can’t use OFF alone because OFF doesn’t cover the population the research is about.
- Food-tech investors + analysts — market sizing for the under-served segment. The independent-shop tier is a real commercial market that the major databases under-count by 50% or more.
Bloomberg / Nielsen-band tiered.
I500 enterprise licensing follows the Bloomberg / Nielsen-band tiered institutional pricing pattern per the Competitive Positioning Report v1.3 §16. Annual contracts. Six-figure range for full institutional licence. Tiered for academic / public-sector / commercial buyers. Commissioner-led borough audits priced separately under the Partner programme (see Door 3 →).
For ad-hoc data access, the ScanSmart Subscription tier (£TBD/month) gives professional users (journalists, dietitians, public-health analysts, researchers) searchable access to the corpus without enterprise commitment.
For pricing on a specific use case, fill out the inquiry form below. Realistic response time: 3–5 business days.
Tell us what you need the I500 for.
Whichever buyer category you fall into, the conversation starts with one paragraph from you about your use case. We’ll come back with what’s available, what’s in the pipeline, and what licence shape fits.