Exploring challenges and opportunities to support people with food allergies to find safe places for eating out

Eating out can be problematic for people who have food allergies. For example, the fear of having an allergic reaction while eating out can cause anxiety and stress especially for young adults, impacting their personal and social life. To address this issue, we describe "AllergyFreeFoodie", a crowdsourced mobile application that aims to support people with food allergies in searching for safe places for eating out. We present an initial prototype together with the results of a preliminary evaluation with 6 young adults in the UK. Based on early findings, we highlight some of the challenges that our participants face in their everyday life and some opportunities for the redesign of the application to promote an allergy-friendly environment for people with food allergies.