That app scoring your groceries? We checked its homework.

Why a simple score can’t capture what’s actually good (or “bad”) for you

Imagine walking through a grocery store with something in your pocket that instantly tells you what to buy. Scan a barcode, get a score, and move on—no more squinting at ingredient lists or second-guessing yourself. Good versus bad, sorted. Shopping on autopilot.

That’s the promise of food and cosmetic scanning apps. And it’s easy to see the appeal: we’re overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice, endless product options, and ingredient lists that read like chemistry exams. A simple score cuts through all of that.

The Yuka app (and many other food and cosmetic-scanning apps) position themselves as solutions to this confusion. These apps can scan your food and tell you immediately the health impact it will have and whether you should buy it. With over 55 million users across 12 countries, it’s very likely that someone in your family or friend group—or maybe even you—has used the Yuka app before. Given just how popular it is, this app is clearly influencing what we choose to buy and how we think about certain food and cosmetic ingredients.

The problem is that nutrition and ingredient safety aren’t binary. Forcing them into green/red categories can mislead more than it helps. So let’s break down how these apps work and why their approach can be problematic. Let’s discuss…

What is the Yuka app?

By simply snapping a photo of a product, Yuka claims to take the guesswork out of decision-making by assigning a health score. For food products, the app scans the item, assigns it a score out of 100 (with 100 being the highest and 0 the lowest), and places it into one of four color-coded categories: Excellent (green), Good (yellow), Poor (orange), or Bad (red). If the food scanned got a low score, the app also provides ‘healthier’ alternatives. For those who don’t want to, or can’t, scan a barcode, users can also search directly within the app, which contains a database of over 6 million food and cosmetic products that are evaluated using the same scoring system.

How the Yuka app delivers a rating

According to Yuka, they assign their health score on three criteria: Nutritional quality (60% of the score), presence of additives (30% of the score), and whether it’s organic or not (10% of the score)

Let’s go through each one.

How Yuka rates nutrition

This is actually one of the stronger parts of their rating system. To assess nutritional quality, they rely on the Nutri-Score system. Nutri-Score is a widely used front-of-pack labelling system in Europe that ranks foods on a scale from A to E, where A represents the highest nutritional quality and E the lowest. The system rewards foods for positive components such as dietary fiber, protein, fruits and vegetables, as well as nuts and certain oils, while penalizing products higher in less desirable components like saturated fat, sugar, salt, and overall calorie content. Perhaps you’ve seen some European food that has this on the package:

Nutri-Score, which gives foods an A-to-E rating, is the system Yuka uses to assess their nutritional value. When it comes to evaluating nutrition, the Yuka app can be useful for identifying products lower in saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium.

The thing is: this is only 60% of the rating. The other 40% is where it gets problematic.

How Yuka rates food additives

In the Yuka app, every additive is assigned a risk level and a different color in the app: risk-free (green dot), limited risk (yellow dot), moderate risk (orange dot), and high risk (red dot). In the app, they provide information about the risk associated with each additive, along with the corresponding scientific sources.

A couple of problems here:

• Misrepresenting risk: Yuka does not take into account how much of an ingredient is in a particular food, and most food additives are used in very small amounts. An ingredient’s mere presence does not automatically make it a risk. This framing ignores important factors, like how much of an ingredient people are actually exposed to and how that compares to amounts considered safe, which are key to understanding real risk.

• Inconsistency with current regulatory standards: The app may label certain additives as “risky” even when major regulatory authorities such as the FDA, CFIA, and EFSA have evaluated them as safe for use in specific foods at defined levels.

• Fuels misunderstanding or anxiety: When a food receives a low score because of an additive, the app highlights the negative health effects it claims are associated with that ingredient—labels like ‘possible carcinogen’, intestinal inflammation’, ‘disturbance of the gut microbiota’ or similar warnings, often presented without any context. If you want to dig into the science behind these claims, good luck navigating their general sources page with over 200 references and left to sort through them yourself to figure out which study supposedly supports which additive and which health outcome.

Side note: Additives are not the devil. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a free-for-all in the food industry. They can’t just add whatever they want to food. Food additives serve specific purposes, and most countries have laws that require food ingredients to be proven safe for their specific uses in food. Food companies are legally required to comply with these regulations in order to manufacture and sell products.

On their website, they mention that each additive’s score is based on an analysis of relevant scientific evidence, including collective assessment reports from agencies such as the FDA and EFSA, as well as independent scientific studies, with priority given to higher-quality evidence like systematic reviews and meta-analyses. While this sounds promising, we put it to the test.

Right now, they rate carrageenan (a popular food additive for thickening and stabilizing) derived from red seaweed as ‘high risk’. They also label it a ‘suspected carcinogen’. To find more information, I went to their general sources page, where they keep all the data they use to make their decisions. The data they have for carrageenan, you ask?

• A handful of cell and animal studies—some using degraded carrageenan (also known as poligeenan), a substance not permitted in food and chemically distinct from the food-grade carrageenan found in grocery products

• A few human studies largely focused on people with pre-existing irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)

• A report from a consumer watchdog organization

• A 2018 EFSA re-evaluation they cite concluded there was no concern regarding carcinogenicity or genotoxicity.

This is weak evidence at best, and contradictory at worst. There are no high-quality, long-term human studies linking food-grade carrageenan to cancer—and the EFSA evaluation they cite actually concludes the opposite.

Key scientific assessments that Yuka didn’t reference, which support the safety of carrageenan:

• The Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) evaluation of carrageenan considers it safe at typical intake levels by assigning it a ‘not specified’ ADI, meaning carrageenan can be added to a wide variety of foods without raising concern that we’ll exceed safe dietary levels.

• The CODEX Alimentarius General Standards for Food Additives (GFSA) database shows all the categories of food carragennan is used in and how much

Health decisions are contextual. A food that’s fine for one person might not work for another. Animal studies are often designed to find toxic doses, meaning researchers give subjects far more of a substance than any human would ever consume—an ingredient that causes harm at those extreme levels won’t necessarily pose any risk at the tiny amounts found in food. Apps like Yuka flatten all of this into a single number, which feels satisfying but misrepresents reality.

How Yuka rates organic vs non-organic food

The final method the Yuka app uses to score a food product is based on its organic status. In the app, they state that ‘they (organic foods) avoid chemical pesticides which can pose a health risk’.

Let’s get a couple of things straight:

1. Organic produce and products are not pesticide-free. Both organic and conventional farming use pesticides. The key difference is that organic agriculture generally prohibits synthetic pesticides (with a few exceptions) and instead uses pesticides derived from natural sources. However, ‘natural’ does not automatically mean safer. Pesticide safety is determined by factors such as dose, method of application, and the amount of residue that remains on food—not by whether it is natural or synthetic. All pesticides permitted for use, in both organic and conventional farming, are evaluated for safety, and residue levels on produce are regulated and monitored.

2. Organic foods are not consistently more nutritious than conventionally produced foods. This systematic review of 147 studies, encompassing 656 comparative analyses across 1,779 food samples, found that most comparisons showed no significant nutritional differences. When differences were observed, they were limited to specific foods or nutrients rather than indicating a broad nutritional advantage of organic foods.

3. Organic food does not provide demonstrably greater health benefits than conventional food. This systematic review of human studies found no consistent evidence of health benefits from consuming organic food. Observed associations in some studies were largely based on observational data and may reflect broader lifestyle differences rather than the organic foods themselves.

People have different motivations for choosing organic food. However, if your goal is better health, the evidence suggests you’re better off focusing on overall diet quality: eating a wide variety of foods, choosing different colors and flavours, and selecting foods you actually enjoy and will consistently eat.

The unintended consequences of these apps

These apps promise a quick fix to the confusing and contradictory world of food and nutrition information—but some unintended consequences are often overlooked:

• Encouraging unnecessary hyperfixation on food. People can become overly concerned with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods and obsess over ingredients that pose little to no real harm. Chances are, obsessing over avoiding carrageenan in your diet does more harm than the carrageenan itself. For people who already struggle with food and food choices, this app could encourage hyperfixation and contribute to disordered eating habits.

• They usually recommend the more expensive option. The app consistently nudges consumers toward ‘additive-free’ and organic alternatives, which are often more expensive. In many processed foods, removing additives can reduce product stability, require higher amounts of other ingredients, or shorten shelf life for quality and food safety reasons. These changes often increase production costs and consequently the price of food. For individuals or families on a budget who rely on food-scanning apps to make healthier choices, this can create the perception that eating “healthy” necessarily means paying more.

• Missed opportunity for nutrition and food education: This app could be a powerful tool to help people make informed, evidence-based food choices. Instead, it fails to educate, keeping users engaged through fear-mongering about regulated, safe food additives. By reducing food to a simple score, it discourages critical thinking and genuine nutrition literacy, encouraging dependency on the app rather than empowering users to make choices that fit their own lifestyle.

We’ve seen how the app can oversimplify, omit important context, and make people unnecessarily anxious about food. So how does it handle cosmetics?

How the Yuka App Evaluates Cosmetics

If you feel overwhelmed by the choices in a grocery store, chances are you feel overwhelmed while shopping for beauty products as well. You’re not alone. There are just so many products to choose from, and these days we’re bombarded from every direction, with brand marketing promising “clean” or “non‑toxic” formulas, influencers peddling mysterious botanicals, and endless TikToks declaring that one ingredient or another is dangerous. The message is always the same: this product is safer, that one is harmful, often without any real science behind it. In this noisy landscape, it’s no surprise that people turn to quick tools that promise clarity.

That’s where cosmetic rating apps come in. Just like food rating apps, they offer the ultimate convenience: scan a barcode, get an instant safety score, and walk away feeling confident about your choice. It sounds empowering, almost like having a personal cosmetic chemist in your pocket. But as helpful as the idea may seem, the execution falls short. These apps boil complex toxicology and regulatory science down to a single number, and in doing so, they frequently mislead consumers rather than inform them.

These apps pull from hazard databases and published research, but many of those sources don’t apply to real‑world cosmetic use. They also use the precautionary principle, meaning they assume the worst‑case scenario whenever there’s any uncertainty. That often leads to overly alarming ratings. A product can get flagged simply because an ingredient is listed, regardless of whether it’s present at levels that global regulatory agencies say are safe.

The presence of an ingredient’s name can tank a product’s rating, even when that ingredient is used at levels widely considered safe by global regulatory authorities. And because cosmetics don’t list ingredient concentrations, the apps are left guessing, and that means usually assuming the worst‑case scenario.

This oversimplification might feel comforting in an age of information overload, but it often leads to inaccurate or unfair assessments. Understanding why requires a look at what a real cosmetic safety evaluation actually involves and how formal scientific review differs from the snapshot judgments made by apps.

CIR Does What Yuka Doesn’t

When it comes to cosmetic ingredient safety, there’s actually a formal review process already in place. The Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) is a long‑standing, independent panel of dermatologists, toxicologists, and medical scientists that evaluates whether cosmetic ingredients are safe by looking at how they’re actually used in real products. Since 1976, CIR has published transparent reports that weigh concentration, product type, and typical exposure to deliver conclusions like “safe,” “safe with limits,” or “insufficient data.”’ This is the kind of context consumers could actually use to make informed choices. Admittedly, the full reports are dense and not easy to read, but they present a thorough evaluation of all the available data and context of use. That information is used to inform a consumer-friendly website:

https://www.cosmeticsinfo.org/

. It’s a great place to learn more about cosmetic products and ingredients.

What’s important is that CIR doesn’t just look at an ingredient’s name; it looks at how much, how often, and in what kind of product you’re likely to encounter it, and then explains the reasoning in detail. Apps like Yuka seem to completely ignore these critical CIR assessments.

When Apps Get It Wrong: A Real‑World Example

I decided to give a popular rating app a little test with some ingredients that I know well. The Yuka app rates bakuchiol, an ingredient marketed as a gentle alternative to retinol, as “risk‑free.” But that score doesn’t reflect the full safety picture. Bakuchiol itself is generally well‑tolerated, but its source plant (Psoralea corylifolia, a herb used in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine) naturally contains psoralens, compounds known to be phototoxic, meaning that on exposure to sunlight, they can transform into skin-damaging compounds if not removed through purification. Bakuchiol must be properly isolated, and this is a nuance Yuka’s scoring does not capture because I also did a search for some products containing Psoralea corylifolia extracts (not purified bakuchiol), scanned the bar codes, and the extracts were noted as “risk-free.”

Ingredient quality and purification matter. While pure bakuchiol is not considered photosensitizing, extracts of Psoralea corylifolia that aren’t rigorously purified may still contain these photoreactive contaminants. Yuka’s system doesn’t distinguish between high‑purity, well‑processed bakuchiol and lower‑grade extracts, so its “risk‑free” label can give consumers a false sense of security. It also leans into the nature fallacy, which is the assumption that plant-derived ingredients are automatically safer or gentler, which isn’t always true. Natural extracts can vary widely in composition, potency, and purity, and without that nuance, an ingredient’s “natural” status can overshadow very real safety considerations.

So, what can we do instead?

Apps like Yuka aim to make decision-making easier. People use them because they want a simple answer. Scan, score, done. That’s the seduction. The problem is that simplicity comes at the cost of accuracy.

If you use the app to manage allergies or ingredient intolerances, keep in mind that major allergens are legally required to be clearly labeled in both the U.S and Canada. If there’s a specific ingredient you need to avoid, the most reliable approach is to read the ingredient list on the package yourself. Over time, you’ll get faster at spotting what matters to you—without a meaningless health score attached.

We get it—deciding what to buy for yourself and your family is hard when the messaging is this confusing. But remember that by law, ingredients in commercially sold foods and cosmetics must be proven safe. For personalized guidance, registered dietitians are the most qualified professionals to help. They can support dietary restrictions, manage health conditions, and help you reduce ultra-processed foods in a practical, individualized way.

Instead of using an app, here are some sources that can help you evaluate what foods are best for you:

For Americans:

• FDA resource on how to read a nutrition facts label: https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/how-understand-and-use-nutrition-facts-label

• FDA resource for teachers teaching food and nutrition: https://www.fda.gov/food/students-teachers/science-and-our-food-supply#nutrition

• To learn more about how the FDA evaluates and regulates food additives:

  https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-and-gras-ingredients-information-consumers/understanding-how-fda-regulates-food-additives-and-gras-ingredients

• Cosmetic Ingredient Review Website: https://www.cir-safety.org/

• Cosmetic Ingredient Review Safety Reports: https://cir-reports.cir-safety.org/

• More general information about cosmetics, as well as consumer-friendly ingredient information: https://www.cosmeticsinfo.org/

For Canadians:

• A tool from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that helps consumers understand food labels, claims, and best-before dates so they can make more informed food choices: https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/consumers

• To learn more about food additive safety, regulation, and purposes from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/food-safety/food-additives.html

• Tool from Health Canada for all things cosmetic safety, labelling, ingredients, and more: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/cosmetics.html

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science