The operators of the French app Yuka invite consumers, including in Italy, to subscribe to the premium version of the service. A plea for support, including financial support, for an initiative that started from the bottom and remains without external funders and offers an excellent service to all.
Yuka’s premium version
The app launched by a team of young French people in January 2017 has been available in Italy since 2020. In just one year it was downloaded by 2 million Italian consumers, which has now doubled. As we have reported extensively, the system makes it possible to know the nutritional profile of packaged foods in an instant by scanning their bar codes with a smartphone. The same service covers the ingredient list (inci) of cosmetics.
The premium version of Yuka offers two useful features:
- access to the complete database of products, without the need to scan them from time to time. 2.5 million foods and 1.5 million cosmetics, 1,200 new products every day. A very useful function to overcome signal scarcity at the supermarket,
- the selection of one’s food preferences, to know immediately whether palm oil, gluten, lactose, animal ingredients are found in each product. This function could hopefully be developed for individual allergens as well, thanks to financial support for Yuka.
How much does it cost
The cost of the premium version of Yuka is 10 euros, with an invitation to those who can to make a larger contribution as well. It deserves emphasis that membership lasts for 12 months and is not automatically renewed.
The entire organization of the app is consumer-friendly. No personal data is retained from users, who globally perform 3.5 million scans per day (41 per second) every day. Nor do advertisements appear in the app.
Independent (and persecuted)
Yuka receives no external funding of any kind, least of all from the food and cosmetics industry. On the contrary, for his work in reporting the presence of nitrites in cured meats, he suffered judicial attacks from the French federation of the cured meat industry.
In fact, Yuka’s only income-as its financial statements, available on its website, show-comes from individual subscriptions to the premium version of the app and from the sale of publications, a book and a calendar, still only available in France.
Waiting for the NutriScore
Yuka’s usefulness is extraordinary, especially in countries like Italy where the NutriScore is not yet visible on the label:
- those who use it have improved the nutritional quality of their shopping carts, according to the latest report published by Yuka.
- the food industry and retail have begun reformulating foods and cosmetics-even in Italy, as seen in Esselunga’s industrial bread-to improve nutritional profiles and remove suspect additives.
An additional reason to support Yuka is to affirm the constitutional right to freedom of opinion that was also threatened in Italy, in the antitrust inquisition on the French app(in fact later resolved into nothingness)
Marta Strinati and Dario Dongo
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.
