Yuka, which lets users track the healthiness of the food in supermarkets, is funded by its premium subscribers.
Yuka CEO Julie Chapon says the app has “never accepted money from brands”
The global app, which was developed in France and launched in 2015, is aimed at helping people shop more healthily, which it does by letting you scan barcodes of one of around six million products in its database, which are they ranked green, yellow or red for good, room for improvement, or bad.
There are around 1,200 new products added every day, and the app includes in depth information for them if you want to explore further.
With 28 million users across the US, six million in France, five million across the UK and another 46 million in nine countries across the rest of the world.
Co-founder and CEO Chapon told the BBC: “We have never accepted money from brands to influence our ratings or recommendations.
“Our revenue comes from users, through the premium version of the app.”
While a small percentage of users actually pay for the premium service, the total number of users is so large that it’s enough.
Yuka has its own food scientists, but there is still a reliance on academic work and publicly-available data, and the work of Nutri-Score.
Chapon noted that Yuka has been able to impact shopping habits, and in a 2024 survey of 20,000 users than found that 94 percent of them had put products back after seeing a red rating.
There has been a wider impact in shops too, with French super and hyper-market chain Intermarché – which is the country’s third largest with over 2,100 branches – actively changing its products because of Yuka.
The company commented: “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.”
Food tracking app refuses to accept ‘money from brands’
