Yuka-the app that helps people choose foods based on ‘what the labels don’t say’ (nutritional profiles and potentially dangerous additives), as well as organic certification-is finally active in Italy. Fifty thousand people have already downloaded it, and together with consumAtors in 10 other countries perform an average of 55 scans per second, totaling 5 million products each day.
As we had announced on the eve of its launch in Italy, Yuka in fact allows you to get an objective judgment on every food on the shelf in an instant by bringing your smartphone close to its label. To measure its effectiveness, we performed its test at the supermarket.
Yuka, here’s how it works
The app can be downloaded for free from theapp store. Once installed on the smartphone, it must be activated by entering a user name and email address. With this account it is also possible to contribute to the growth of the database and report any errors, as we shall see.
The operation is very simple. You select the ‘scan’ item on the footer menu and frame the bar code printed on a product package. You immediately get a screen with the rating of the food.
The criteria for judging alimony
Yuka provides an overall judgment of foods based on three aspects:
– The nutritional profile, assessed according to NutriScore criteria, accounts for 60 percent of the overall assessment,
– chemical safety of the food, focusing on the possible presence of problematic additives, counts for 30 percent of the judgment. Explanatory documentation and the scientific literature on which the evaluation rests are provided for each additive,
– In contrast, organic origin, evidenced by the presence of European organic farming certification, accounts for 10 percent of the overall assessment.
For each product judged to be bad, alternatives are proposed if available.
Yuka, the instant comparison. Test
The instant food comparison test offered by Yuka confirms, at a glance, the usefulness of the app. Among the many products examined, we offer a narrow selection, limited to orange drinks.
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More functions in Yuka’s paid version
The Yuka paid version (15 euros/year) is not yet active in Italy. It will be when the national database has reached 90 percent of the references available on the shelf. Two useful additional functions will then be offered:
– Offline consultation of the database, to search for products by their names. A useful feature to plan grocery shopping from home, in online shopping, but also in supermarkets with poor line coverage. Activating this option downloads an archive with the 100 thousand most popular products (50 MB of data) to the phone,
– Further information on food. Such as the presence of palm oil, gluten, lactose, ingredients unsuitable for a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Some shortcomings
Our test of Yuka, a couple of months after its launch in Italy, is favorable. There is a marked increase in the number of references in the database, with some errors and small room for improvement.
Frequent typos: ‘cracke’ instead of cracker, ‘frillini’ for shortbread, ‘chedda’ for cheddar, etc. It’s like reading Inspector Closeau ‘Frenching’ names. Mistakes are remedied by product image and a modicum of intuition.
Haribo, the Pink Panther
The Pink Panther had put his hand on Haribo’s Cocobat candy card. These had received a poor rating (score 34/100) because they were classified as an organic product. The identity of the author of the German candy fake news remains unknown.
GIFT(Great Italian Food Trade) urges its readers to boycott Haribo as early as 2017, due to exploitation including child exploitation for its carnauba palm supplies. We sent a report to Yuka and the database was immediately corrected. The rating is now poor (24/100).
Contributing to the shared database
Everyone can add products not in the database and also report errors, following the invitation in the margin of each tab. The procedure is triggered by the very screen that communicates ‘assessment not available.’ Entry is done with a wizard, which is completed with product images.
Immediately after a new product is entered, its evaluation is available. A word of warning: entering incorrect information into the database will result in permanent deletion of theaccount. A special team is assigned to verify the information.
Small technical problems
One limitation found in our test was the inability to manually enter nutritional information. In fact, the Yuka system accepts only the image of the nutrition table. The frequent cases where the statement is displayed in a linear format (allowed by EU Reg. 1169/11 due to space requirements) therefore remain unassessed.
Another problem in product inclusion arises in the case of more extensive nutrition tables that include optional information. Such as the one for organic sunflower oil pictured here, where fatty acid profiles and vitamin E values are specified. Too much data, according to the Yuka scheme, which covers only the 8 mandatory items required by reg. EU 1169/11. In this case, however, the problem is solvable. The table is forfeited with the error warning and is manually corrected directly in the app.
Crowdsourcing and collaborations
Yuka’s team confirms to us that consumAtors are participating in crowdsourcing data, as are some players in the supply chain.
Our database is shared in all the countries where we are present (11 at the moment), so we cannot say exactly how many Italian products have been included. By now, our database recognizes 80% of the products marketed in Italy.
Some Italian brands have begun contacting us to include their products in our database. It is a free collaboration that we offer to brands, which can share information about their products. Since the data that brands report to us is public information that by law must be on products, there is no conflict of interest.
Large-scale retail trade lagging behind
On the other hand, large-scale retail is lagging behind in including its spearheads, namely private label products.
Collaboration with brands is still very limited compared to other countries such as France or Spain. Currently, our database is enriched mainly by local Italian contributors (commissioned by the Yuka team, ed.) and by users who are invited to add products they do not yet know about, following a guided process directly in the app.
Italians are contributing greatly to the addition of products! Thanks in part to a new machine learning system, which has enabled us to speed up and simplify the process of adding products, users are even more incentivized to contribute.
The Yuka app obviously blocks those who enter bogus data and also evaluates cosmetics. We will deal with these later.
Professional journalist since January 1995, he has worked for newspapers (Il Messaggero, Paese Sera, La Stampa) and periodicals (NumeroUno, Il Salvagente). She is the author of journalistic surveys on food, she has published the book "Reading labels to know what we eat".
Dario Dongo, lawyer and journalist, PhD in international food law, founder of WIISE (FARE - GIFT - Food Times) and Égalité.
