Can an App Make You Eat Better? Inside the Rise of Food-Tracking Tech
Standing in the biscuit aisle of a Hyper U supermarket west of Paris, a shopper named Nathalie scans a packet of sweet biscuits with her smartphone. The screen flashes red: 0 out of 100. The biscuits — a favorite of her 12-year-old son Malo — are loaded with sugar and saturated fats and contain four additives, including one flagged as a health risk. She taps on the additive, E450, and reads that excessive intake can lead to bone marrow and kidney problems.
She tries an Italian alternative with rustic packaging suggesting artisanal origins. The score is barely better. The app suggests an organic, wholewheat, fruit-and-fibre alternative. Nathalie buys it, but notes the trade-off: healthier often means pricier, and shopping now takes longer. “Malo hates shopping with me now,” she says. “You spend ages scanning and he can never have what he wants.”
Nathalie is one of a growing number of consumers using Yuka, a French app that lets shoppers scan product barcodes for instant health ratings — green for good, yellow for could be better, red for bad — across food, cosmetics, and toiletries. The database covers roughly six million products, with about 1,200 new entries added each day. Users can drill down for detailed nutritional and additive information, page after page.
From French Startup to Global Reach
Launched in 2015, Yuka now claims 85 million users across 12 countries, spanning Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. The UK ranks third with around five million users. France is second with six million. But the dominant market by a wide margin is the United States, with 28 million users — enough to have caught the attention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has called Yuka his favourite app.
Yuka was founded in France, where it maintains its headquarters, but co-founder and CEO Julie Chapon relocated to the US three years ago, citing the app’s strong American growth. The need is simply greater there, she suggests diplomatically: “I’m thrilled to be in a country where there is still so much progress to be made.”
A Wider Ecosystem of Food Transparency
Yuka is not operating in isolation. It is part of a broader food-transparency movement that has been building in France for over a decade. In 2012, French programmer Stéphane Gigandet launched Open Food Facts, a free, crowdsourced, nonprofit database now containing information on more than four million food products worldwide. It debuted during the Food Revolution Day organized by British chef Jamie Oliver.
Two months after Yuka’s launch, the French government introduced Nutri-Score, a voluntary front-of-pack labeling system for pre-packaged food. Its creator, Sorbonne University food researcher Serge Hercberg, was inspired by the UK’s Traffic Light system — which uses green, amber, and red indicators for sugar, fat, salt, and calories — but wanted something simpler. “The Nutri-Score gives a global score,” he says. “You can tell at a glance whether a product is going to be good or bad for your health.”
The system arrived only after a tug-of-war with the food industry. Major manufacturers like Danone and Nestlé have widely adopted Nutri-Score, but brands that would score poorly often simply opt out. “Applications like Yuka and Open Food Facts fill that gap,” says Hercberg.
These apps also go beyond what Nutri-Score offers. They provide detailed information on additives — the chemicals coded as E-numbers that preserve or color food — whose presence is a strong indicator of ultra-processed food. Yuka relies on its own food scientists but draws primarily on academic publications and publicly available data, incorporating Nutri-Score data into its own product assessments.
The Business Model Question
Unlike Nutri-Score, a government scheme, and Open Food Facts, a nonprofit, Yuka is a private, for-profit company. Chapon says revenue comes exclusively from a premium version of the app — not from advertising, sponsored rankings, or product placement. “We have never accepted money from brands to influence our ratings or recommendations,” she says. The percentage of paying users is tiny, but with 85 million total users, it is enough to sustain the business.
Does It Actually Change Behavior?
The evidence is mixed but intriguing. A 2024 Yuka survey of 20,000 users found that 94% put products back on the shelf when the app displayed a red rating. Whether that translates into sustained dietary change is harder to establish.
Christian Reynolds, Reader in Food Policy at City St George’s University, London, cautions that tech is just one tool among many. He supported a British government review on how people interact with labels and food information. “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 a structural limitation: these tools disproportionately reach the already health-conscious. “Unfortunately, they essentially only touch the more privileged section of the population, who are not those most at risk of health problems linked to the way they eat,” he says. He views Nutri-Score, Yuka, and Open Food Facts as allies that already share data among themselves.
Changing the Food Industry Itself
The most striking evidence of Yuka’s market impact may be Intermarché, France’s third-largest supermarket chain, with over 2,100 stores. The company says it has reformulated more than 3,000 recipes and removed 160 additives since 2017, driven partly by Yuka scores. In 2024 alone, it reworked roughly 300 product formulations. In April of this year, Intermarché began displaying Yuka scores directly on its online shopping site — an unusual concession to a third-party app by a major retailer.
That a single app could push a national grocery chain to reformulate thousands of products is a signal moment for food-tech’s real-world leverage. The question now is whether that influence scales beyond France and beyond the already-engaged consumer. With 28 million American users and a CEO now based in the US, Yuka is betting that it can — and that the world’s largest food market is ready to scan before it swallows.