Standing in the biscuits sucrées aisle of her local Hyper U supermarket west of Paris, Nathalie holds up her phone in dismay after scanning a packet of her 12-year-old son’s favorite biscuits. The screen flashes 0 out of 100 in red lettering. “This is one of Malo’s favourites but it’s not only full of sugar and saturated fats, there are four additives as well including one health risk,” she says, before tapping into the details of one additive, E450, described in the app as “a mineral which, taken in excess, can lead to bone marrow and kidney problems.” “Honestly, that they can put this sort of thing in food aimed at children drives me nuts!” she adds.
Nathalie is one of a growing number of shoppers relying on Yuka, a French-developed app that scans barcodes to rate food, cosmetics, and toiletries as healthy or harmful. Users can scan any of the roughly six million products in Yuka’s database, which grows by about 1,200 new entries daily, and receive an instant rating: green for good, red for bad, yellow for middling, with the option to explore extensive additional detail.
Launched in 2015, Yuka has grown to 85 million users across 12 countries, spanning much of Europe as well as the US, Canada, and Australia. France has roughly six million users and the UK around five million, but the United States leads by a wide margin with 28 million users, including prominent fans such as US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has called it his favorite app.
Although Yuka was founded in France, where it remains headquartered, co-founder and CEO Julie Chapon relocated to the United States three years ago as the app’s popularity there surged. She attributes its American success to greater underlying need. “I’m thrilled to be in a country where there is still so much progress to be made,” she says.
In France, Yuka exists alongside a broader movement toward food transparency. In 2012, programmer Stéphane Gigandet launched Open Food Facts, a free, crowdsourced, nonprofit database that now covers information on more than four million food products worldwide. Around the same time Yuka launched, the French government introduced its own Nutri-Score labeling system, created by food researcher Serge Hercberg of Sorbonne University in Paris.
“I was inspired in particular by the UK’s Traffic Light system which gives green, amber or red lights for sugar, fat, salt, calories… but I wanted something simpler,” Hercberg explains. “The Nutri-Score gives a global score. You can tell at a glance whether a product is going to be good or bad for your health.” Nutri-Score is a voluntary front-of-pack label that many major manufacturers, including Danone and Nestlé, have widely adopted, though some brands opt out, particularly when their products would score poorly.
“Applications like Yuka and Open Food Facts fill that gap,” Hercberg says, noting that they go further than Nutri-Score by flagging specific additives, chemical compounds used to preserve or color food and coded as e-numbers, whose presence often signals that a product is ultra-processed.
Not everyone views these tools as a complete solution. Christian Reynolds, a food policy researcher at City St George’s University in London, points to research showing the limits of technology-driven approaches. “I supported a British government review on how people interact with labels and information, and the take home from that was that few people have the time, capacity or inclination to engage with shopping and food choices beyond routine,” he says.
Hercberg acknowledges similar limitations, noting that food-tracking tools tend to reach mainly privileged consumers rather than those most vulnerable to diet-related health problems. Even so, he views Nutri-Score, Yuka, and Open Food Facts as complementary allies working toward the same goal of sharing nutritional information, with Yuka incorporating Nutri-Score data into its own assessments alongside academic research and publicly available data from its in-house scientists.
Unlike Nutri-Score and Open Food Facts, Yuka operates as a profitable private company, according to Chapon, though she emphasizes that its revenue comes solely from users through a premium app subscription rather than advertising or paid product placement. “We have never accepted money from brands to influence our ratings or recommendations,” she says, adding that only a small percentage of users pay for premium, but the app’s massive overall user base makes that sufficient.
Chapon points to evidence that Yuka genuinely influences shopping behavior. A 2024 company survey of 20,000 users found that 94% reported putting products back on the shelf after receiving a red rating. Perhaps the clearest example of the app’s broader impact on the food industry comes from Intermarché, France’s third-largest supermarket chain with more than 2,100 stores, which says it has overhauled numerous own-brand recipes as a direct result of poor Yuka scores. “Since 2017, we have reformulated over 3,000 recipes and taken out 160 additives… Last year alone, we re-worked the formulations of around 300 products,” the company said in a statement.
