I have an exciting and tedious update! I finally fixed a very tricky bug. Some awesome Double Check Vegan users had alerted me a while back to an issue with the search function when a user input a vegan ingredient whose letters contained a non-vegan ingredient within them. So, if you pasted a list of ingredients that included “Shea butter” which is vegan, the results would include “butter” as a flagged non-vegan ingredient. This was also true for “Fucus vesiculosus extract” – a seaweed extract – whose letters contain the phrase “sus extract” which is made from pig skin.
Because Double Check Vegan lets you paste an entire list of ingredients and search them with one click instead of making you put in one ingredient at a time, it was tricky to fix. Initially, to deal with this, I wrote a note so that if “butter” and “sus extract” were returned the user would be instructed to double-check the ingredients to make sure those non-vegan items were actually in the product. But, after many hours with the programmer, we’ve solved the issue – in a way. The search engine now knows that “Fucus vesiculosus extract,” “Shea butter,” “Honeysuckle,” and “Cocoa Butter” are vegan. But I have to manually add other problem ingredients to the list.
So, if you come across any ingredients that fit this scenario – a vegan ingredient that contains the phrase for a non-vegan ingredient within it, please send them my way. I haven’t thought of any others yet.
And as always, please forward me any correspondence from brands about the vegan-status of their products, especially art supplies.
Thank you for reading.
Jon Cousins
June 20, 2018Not sure if it counts, but Coconut Milk comes up saying that it contains milk…
rebsy
June 21, 2018Thank you very much for your comment, Jon! This is great addition. I added it to the exceptions list so “coconut milk” should not come up now. I’ll add other milks like soy, etc. I’m amazed this didn’t come up until now. Thanks again.