Can AI Help You Decode Food Labels and Cosmetic Ingredients? Here's What This App Offers

If you're part of the alternative milk craze, I have some news for you: They often contain gums and oils to make their texture more like cow's milk and you could end up with a coated tongue that makes your coffee, cereal or oatmeal a little less enjoyable. 

I feel like I annoy baristas with the question of whether their milk contains gelling agents so I set out to find a way to analyze products in my own shopping rotation, to be informed and to choose items for something beyond their brand appeal. 

This is how I found Yuka, a mobile app that allows you to scan barcodes across food labels and cosmetic products and receive evaluations and suggestions in response to a product's health score (0–100). 

What is Yuka, and how does it work?

Yuka was founded by French siblings Benoît and François Martin and their friend Julie Chapon, who won a "Food Hackathon" event in 2016, and launched the company in 2017. 

Interestingly, Yuka's brand icon is an orange carrot, which represents Yuka's first iteration, a magnetic, carrot-shaped device for the refrigerator. It's since morphed into a mobile app available on iOS and Android, which features a free and premium version of its product starting at $15 a year.

Yuka stands out for its ability to combine nutrition, additives and organic status of products. This could potentially help manufacturers re-formulate or improve their products, in addition to customers being able to quickly tell if it's a product suited to their needs.

Yuka's platform starts with a scoring system across its three key factors, then provides an ingredient analysis -- informed by peer-reviewed studies and updated by a team of researchers and toxicology experts -- and then concludes with recommendations for healthier options. (Gotta love the simplicity of a three-part framework!)

It uses artificial intelligence to compare the ingredient list of a product with other products in its categories to check for inconsistencies, and this is then manually verified by humans before being published and pushed out to the app. AI is also used to detect potential errors in its database of ingredients and additives.

Yuka says it does not use AI for its product ratings or scoring system.

How to use Yuka to scan and analyze items' health impact

Get your phone ready -- you'll need it to download and use Yuka.

1. First, download Yuka, available for iPhone and Android, and sign in by making an account with an email address and a new password. 
2. Find some products wherever you're shopping and point your camera to focus on the barcode. This will generate a color-coded score (green or red) out of 100. I tried Yuka out with some new zinc sunscreen (poorly rated) and almond milk yogurt (highly rated), which surprised me, as I thought these scores would be backward due to the gums in my almond milk yogurt. 
3. Tap the product at the bottom of your screen for a breakdown on why a product got its score. This includes details on nutrition, additives, whether it's considered organic and any linked studies for more information. Here you can also explore recommended alternatives and save your scan history for quick, future access. 

In my case, Yuka gave my almond milk yogurt a high rating because of its nutritional content. The additives that I was particularly concerned about didn't warrant a lower score than 78/100. 

As for my $40 mineral sunscreen, it was rated poorly because it contained phenoxyethanol and aluminum stearate -- two allergens that may have toxic effects and were labeled as moderate risks. This sunscreen was highly rated on multiple mineral sunscreen-focused listicles (which influenced my purchase) so I was surprised to see it rated 34/100. But, I was also thankful for the additional information. 

If you purchase or upgrade to a premium account, you have the option to use Yuka in offline mode. For more information on this, Yuka has a dedicated Help section on its website with FAQs for free and premium member-specific questions. 

Should you use Yuka?

I was pleasantly surprised by Yuka's strong data ethics -- and ethics in general -- across its site and product. Product info comes from other people's uploads and brands' images instead of scraping from other sites, and its Terms & Conditions disallows scraping, bots or bulk data collection. 

Additionally, Yuka receives no influence from brands and does not give companies access to change scores or edit recommendations offered. They also can't pay Yuka to advertise alongside a multi-level responsible funding resource to eliminate conflict of interest. 

Some of the pushback about Yuka is that its scoring system isn't transparent enough. It currently only shows you a nutritional breakdown for food items, though below it there is a scoring method button that showcases a framework that explains how Yuka scores your product. 

While I agree there is room for improvement with a filtering system based on individual needs, I didn't have an issue with this as I'd use it primarily with food -- and I know what specific ingredients I'm looking to avoid. 

However, Yuka's good and bad rating system could lead to disordered eating, so you should be careful if that's a potential issue for you.

Another pitfall is that some experts also think its rating system could be improved, along with some of the studies it uses as backing for its information.

You must also be mindful that this is an application that uses artificial intelligence, which means there's room for error (and improvement). Yuka's use of AI is on the more responsible side of the spectrum, though -- given it's double checked by humans.

It's important to note that triple-checking any ingredients yourself is the most efficient way to stay abreast of toxins, allergens and what you do or don't want in and on your body. 

I do respect Yuka's business model and approach to human-centered design and output, which may help combat some of the anxiety that surfaces around digital content. 

I think Yuka is a reliable choice for educating yourself on what's going on and into your body, especially with its firm stance against brand advertising.

Correction, July 17: This story originally misstated Yuka's use of artificial intelligence. Yuka's primary use case for AI is comparing the ingredient list of a product with other products in its categories to check for inconsistencies and for data collection errors, and that work is then manually verified. AI is not used for scoring or recommendations.