The Yuka app, which reveals the nutritional profile of foods in one click, is stimulating the reformulation of industrial recipes. And in its fifth year it is working on introducing an eco-score, a score on the environmental impact of food.
Yuka, a turbocharger to recipe reformulation
According to François Martin, one of the app’s three founders, Yuka’s popularity among consumers is convincing the food industry to review recipes, reducing the share of fat, sugar, and salt and replacing problematic additives.
The path of reformulation is actually fed by several tributaries. They favor it
- Health prevention policies for diseases caused by unbalanced diets, for example, such as the British Health and Care Bill, (2)
- the NutriScore front-on-pack nutrition label and its emulators, such as the version of the U.S.health logo in definition (3,4)
- the growing awareness of consumers, who are increasingly interested in eating without excess, as also noted in the latest Immagino report. (5)
This trend convinced the French GDO chain Intermarché to reformulate 900 branded products, removing 140 additives.
Yuka, here comes the eco-score
The app started in 2017 in France and is now active in 12 countries. In Italy, where it arrived in late 2020, it was downloaded by 2 million consumers in just one year. Numbers that demonstrate a thirst for information about the nutritional profiles of foods on the shelf.
The food evaluation system considers:
- The nutritional profile, according to the NutriScore system,
- the presence of additives indicated as problematic by the scientific community (and risk assessment authorities, such as Efsa and Iarc),
- organic farming certification, attesting to the non-use of agrotoxics and increased attention to animal welfare.
An assessment of the environmental impact of the food is now added to these parameters. The eco-score is already being tested in France. And it is one of the hypotheses being considered, along with the more advanced Planet-Score, ahead of the long-awaited-and debated-European environmental label.
Notes
(1) Flora Southey. Five years of Yuka: Co-founder talks strategy, impact, and evolution of food scanning app. Foodnavigator, 11.8.22
(2) Dario Dongo. England, stop junk food advertising thanks to Health and Care Bill. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 2.5.22.
(3) Dario Dongo, Andrea Adelmo Della Penna. NutriScore, consumer health prevails over agribusiness lobby. Petition and insights. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 18.5.22
(4) Dario Dongo. USA, FDA working on a healthy logo to be applied on the front of labels. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 5/21/22
(5) Marta Strinati. Italians’ food consumption in the Immagino Observatory. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 6/18/22.
(6) Marta Strinati, Dario Dongo. Yuka, if you know it spread it. App conquers 2 million Italians in just one year. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 30.9.21
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".
