Yesterday’s episode of Report, 29 May, opened with a short service dedicated to Yuka, the French app developed by Yuca SAS in 2017, brought to court by two companies belonging to the FICT (French federation of delicatessen manufacturers). The prosecution? It seems that there are conflicts of interest behind the app.
What is Yuka
Yuka is an application that allows you to scan food and cosmetic products in order to obtain information on their impact on health. The goal – declared by the founders – is to help the consumer choose products considered good for health and, therefore, to encourage producers to reformulate recipes to achieve the same goal. The idea for this app came from the co-founder Benoit Martin, father of three children, who like most parents felt lost in front of the information on the label of baby food products. So he thought of an instrument that could analyze the composition of ingredients by reading the barcode with a simple smartphone.
How Yuka works
The idea has proved successful – to date the application has been downloaded by 40 million people worldwide and the database contains 4 million food and cosmetic products – also thanks to the “traffic light” system: when a product is considered good the sticker is green, when there are some variables considered risky it is yellow or orange and when the product is considered risky for health the sticker is red. In this case, the app offers the user alternative solutions that it considers healthier. It is precisely on this point that FICT (specifically two manufacturers of cured meats belonging to the vice president of the federation) attacks Yuka accusing her of deceptive commercial practice and of committing defamatory acts.
The accusation of conflict of interest
In the episode of Report the President of FICT Bernard Vallat declares: “Yuka presents itself to the world as a non-governmental organization that wants to guarantee transparency to consumers but in reality it is a commercial company with lots of shareholders who manufacture meat substitute products”. But Yuka’s answer is immediate: “The budget is public and the algorithm that recommends healthier products is totally independent”. Independence is one of Yuka’s cornerstones: no company can pay to appear among the app’s suggestions. And it is probably also for this reason that two appeal courts have agreed with Yuka, “freedom of expression has been safeguarded”, rejoices Sigfrido Ranucci.
It is a fact that nitrates and nitrites are not healthy
Also confirming the reason for the app is the fact that nitrates and nitrites are potentially carcinogenic, to be exact, nitrites have the ability to combine with amines, generating carcinogenic substances called nitrosamines (for further information, we recommend reading the risk assessment explained by EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority). A topic dear to us, so much so that we have dedicated, in our Guida Grandi Salumi 2023, a specific symbol for cured meat companies that do not use any type of preservative. In Italy fortunately more and more numerous.
The limits of Yuka
The app’s problems – also brought to light by the Antitrust through a parliamentary question – for us are others, or rather not just the hypothetical conflict of interest. To explain it we make our own the words of Beatrice Surescientific popularizer, as well as author of the book “It’s natural beauty” where she explains, yes, the success of Yuka but also the great limitations of the French app (which perhaps precisely because it is an app does not address things by going in depth ):
1. Yuka is owned by a company that has a vested interest in making it appear useful.
2. Yuka does not give any information that is not already present and evident on the packaging (nutritional table for foods and list of ingredients for cosmetics). We add: even less information because it does not take into consideration the quantities of ingredients on the label.
3. Yuka does not analyze the product. It draws the info from a database that it built itself.
4. “Red” ingredients and “low” scores describe neither the safety nor the quality of the product.
5. Safety is evaluated upstream, by regulatory bodies and all ingredients authorized for trade are green, i.e. safe. Yuka has chosen to color some of them yellow and red, autonomously and without solid scientific basis.
6. Yuka gives us the idea of helping us choose better but, in fact, he chooses for us.
Six points to keep in mind if and when you use it.