The Yuka app, which reveals the nutritional profile of foods in one click, is stimulating the reformulation of industrial recipes. And in the fifth year of activity he works on the introduction of an eco-score, a score on the environmental impact of food.
Yuka, a turbo for the reformulation of recipes
According to François Martin, one of the three founders of the app, Yuka's spread to consumers is convincing the food industry to review recipes, reducing the share of fat, sugar and salt and replacing problematic additives.
The way of reformulationin fact, it is fed by several tributaries. They favor it
- the health prevention policies of diseases caused by unbalanced diets, for example, like the British Health and Care Bill (2)
- the nutrition label front-on-pack NutriScore and its emulators, such as the version ofhealth logo Use in definition (3,4)
- the growing awareness of consumers, more and more interested in eating without excess, as noted in the latest report I imagine. (5)
This trend convinced the French retail chain Intermarché to reformulate 900 branded products, removing 140 additives.
Yuka, the eco-score arrives
La app born in 2017 in France, it is now active in 12 countries. In Italy, where it reached the end of 2020, it was downloaded by 2 million consumers in just one year. Numbers that demonstrate the thirst for information on the nutritional profiles of shelf foods.
The system food assessment considers:
- the nutritional profile, according to the NutriScore system,
- the presence of additives indicated as problematic by the scientific community (and by risk assessment authorities, such as Efsa and Iarc),
- the certification of organic agriculture, which certifies the non-use of agrotoxicants and greater attention to animal welfare.
To these parameters the environmental impact assessment of the food is now added. The eco-score is already in experimentation in France. And it is one of the hypotheses considered, together with the most advanced Planet Score, in view of the long-awaited - e debated - European environmental label.
Footnotes
(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 advertising junk food thanks to the Health and Care Bill. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 2.5.22
(3) Dario Dongo, Andrea Adelmo Della Penna. NutriScore, consumer health prevails over agro-industrial lobbies. 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 the labels. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 21.5.22
(5) Marta Strinati. The food consumption of Italians in the Immagino Observatory. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 18.6.22
(6) Marta Strinati, Dario Dongo. Yuka, if you know it, you spread it. The app conquers 2 million Italians in just one year. GIFT (Great Italian Food Trade), 30.9.21
A professional journalist since January 1995, she has worked for newspapers (Il Messaggero, Paese Sera, La Stampa) and periodicals (NumeroUno, Il Salvagente). She is the author of journalistic studies on food and has published the book "Reading labels to know what we eat".
