Yuka Keeps Food Consumers Informed with Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK

| Products & Solutions , Retail

reading from smartphone

Founded in 2016, Yuka is a Paris, France-based startup dedicated to keeping consumers informed about the food they eat. In January 2017, Yuka launched a free mobile shopping app that lets consumers evaluate the nutritional value of food products with a simple barcode scan.

“Sixty percent of food products in the market are bad for your health,” said Julie Chapon, co-founder of Yuka. “And food labels are complicated to understand.”

The Yuka app simplifies the food shopping process for consumers to determine if an item has healthy ingredients. Using a smartphone, a shopper can scan the barcode of a food label. The app then displays a product card with an evaluation of the nutritional values and the ingredient list, on a scale ranging from red to green.

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Red indicates levels of unhealthy ingredients such as fat, salt, sugar and additives. The higher the percentage of green ingredients, the healthier the product is. If a product is determined to be unhealthy, the app will recommend similar alternative items that have healthier ingredients.

Yuka developed the app using the Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK to provide scanning functionality. Data collected by the Scandit scanning engine is referenced against the open source Open Food Facts database. If the item does not match one of the 100,000 food products included in Open Food Facts, the user can enter the nutritional values and the list of ingredients that are delivered to the database for analysis. Read the full case study here.

In just a few months since formal launch, Yuka has already reached 60,000 downloads. Most users are located in France, although some are in other parts of Europe.

Before selecting Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK, Yuka tested several different mobile barcode scanning solutions, but found they did not perform well. In contrast, Scandit mobile barcode scanning technology has provided optimal performance.

“Feedback from our users on the app’s scanning capabilities has been positive,” said Chapon. “They say it scans really fast and works very well, even when there isn’t much light.”

Looking ahead, Yuka plans to develop a revenue model for its free consumer app. Possibilities being evaluated include a “freemium” model with paid premium features, as well as developing a white label version of the app other companies can rebrand. The company is also considering making analysis of its user behavior available to food distributors. As Yuka expands its development of the app, it plans to continue providing barcode scanning capability using Scandit technology.

“A lot of users are very impressed by the scan results,” said Chapon.

Download the Yuka app for iOS.

Read the full case study here.