Yuka alternatives: 6 grocery scanner apps compared

Point a grocery scanner app at a barcode and in about a second you get a verdict: a score out of 100, a letter grade, a coloured dot. The apps look alike, but they answer different questions. Some grade a product for everyone at once. Some check it against the person holding the phone. And every one of them takes the numbers printed on the label on trust.

This is a side-by-side look at the scanner apps most people try, Yuka, Open Food Facts, Fooducate, EWG's Healthy Living and Fig, and at SwapGenie, the app we build alongside ExactCups. Features and prices come from each app's own help pages and app store listings as of October 2026; app store prices vary by country and change, so check the listing before you buy.

Yuka

Yuka is the best-known food scanner. It scores food out of 100: nutritional quality is 60% of the score, calculated from the Nutri-Score, additives are 30%, and organic status is 10%. A single additive that Yuka classes as high-risk caps a product at 49 out of 100, and every additive is rated in one of four risk levels from green to red. When a product scores poorly, Yuka recommends similar products rated Good or Excellent, and it says no brand pays to appear in those recommendations. The app carries no advertising and Yuka says its revenue comes from users, never from brands. It reports 80 million users in 12 countries and about 6 million products, food and cosmetics together.

What the free version does not do is check a product against you. Alerts for gluten, lactose, sulfites, soy and palm oil, and for vegetarian, vegan or pork-free diets, are part of Yuka Premium, which the US App Store lists at $10, $15 or $20, with the same features at every price. Yuka also says plainly that it does not take "may contain traces of" warnings into account.

Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is a non-profit association of volunteers and the largest open food database: more than 4 million products from 150 countries, published as open data that anyone may reuse. Its app shows the Nutri-Score from A to E, the NOVA group from 1 to 4, which measures how processed a food is, and the Green-Score for environmental impact (called the Eco-Score until the end of 2024). The app is free and ad-free, and it offers allergen alerts and food preferences, with its own caution that the information and detection may not be 100% accurate. Because volunteers add the products, how complete an entry is varies from one product to the next.

Fooducate

Fooducate gives each food a nutrition grade of A, B, C or D, worked out from the nutrition panel and ingredient list, and flags added sugars, trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG and colourings. It is published by Maple Media. The free version shows ads; the paid Pro version removes them and adds GMO warnings and diet tips, and its App Store listing names keto, low-carb, paleo, vegan and vegetarian diets among the personal features. Allergy checking for gluten, milk, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, fish, shellfish, sesame and corn is a separate $2.99 add-on.

EWG's Healthy Living

The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit, rates more than 200,000 food, skincare and cleaning products on a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 is best. Its food scores weight nutrition most heavily, ingredient concerns next and processing lightly. The app is free; a $19.99 Premium purchase adds product comparison and ingredient preferences.

Fig

Fig is built for dietary restrictions rather than general health scores. It says it supports every dietary restriction and allergy, with more than 2,800 options from low FODMAP and gluten-free to low histamine and alpha-gal. Fig is free to download with a limited number of scans; Fig+ unlocks unlimited scans, restaurant menus and more than one profile, and the App Store lists Fig+ plans from $5.99 a month to $69.99 a year.

SwapGenie

SwapGenie starts from the other end. It reads the barcode, scores the product against your own allergens and diet rather than against a generic grade, and suggests a better version of the same thing to buy instead. There are no ads, no accounts and no data sold, and scanning is free for the first three months. SwapGenie is on Android now through Google Play, and the iOS version arrives on February 15, 2027.

The difference from the general scanners is where the personal check sits. Yuka, Fooducate and EWG each give one score that is the same for everyone, and checking a product against your allergies or diet is a paid extra: Yuka Premium, Fooducate's allergy add-on, EWG's Premium preferences. Fig is personal, but it is a restrictions app with a limited free tier. SwapGenie puts your profile into the score from the first scan, and every verdict ends in a swap, a product to buy instead of the one in your hand, rather than a number to interpret.

What every scanner trusts: the label

All of these apps read databases built from food labels, and a label carries two different kinds of number. The per-100-gram figures are what the scores are built on, and they are generally sound. The serving line is different. "2 tbsp (30 g)" claims that two tablespoons of the product weigh 30 grams, and that claim decides how much sugar, salt or fat is really in the spoonful you eat. ExactCups exists to check exactly that kind of claim.

Sometimes the label is right. Kikkoman's hoisin sauce label says two tablespoons weigh 39 grams, a third more than the same spoonfuls of water, which is what a sauce that is 44% sugar should weigh; here it is USDA's figure, 16 grams a tablespoon, that is too light (hoisin sauce). Sometimes it is a convention, not a measurement. Almost every bag of shredded cheese says a quarter cup weighs 28 grams, because 28 grams, one ounce, is the reference amount the FDA sets for cheese; USDA weighs a cup of shredded part-skim mozzarella at 86 grams, about 22 grams per quarter cup, so the serving on the bag is about 30% heavier than the quarter cup it names (shredded mozzarella). And sometimes it is simply wrong. The US label for Lotus Biscoff Cookie Butter says two tablespoons weigh 30 grams, which is what two tablespoons of water weigh. A spread of oil, sugar and biscuit weighs about a fifth more than water, and two level tablespoons weigh about 36 grams, so a spoonful carries about a fifth more sugar and fat than the label says (cookie butter, and the correction). Huy Fong's sriracha label makes the same assumption: a teaspoon at 5 grams, the weight of water, for a sauce that is more than a quarter sugar, salt and chili and weighs closer to 5.7 grams (sriracha, and its correction).

No scanner can catch that, because the error is in the source data. That is why we build both: SwapGenie for what is in the packet, ExactCups for how much of it is in your spoon. Every figure on ExactCups names its source, and every rejected figure has a page that shows the arithmetic: all corrections.

Which app should you use?

• For one general health score with additive warnings: Yuka, if you do not need allergy or diet alerts for free.
• For open data and a measure of how processed a food is: Open Food Facts.
• For a complex medical restriction such as low FODMAP: Fig.
• For every scan judged against your own allergens and diet, with a better product suggested and no ads, no account and no data sold: SwapGenie, free for three months on Android now and on iOS from February 15, 2027.

The scanner chooses the product. The scale, or a figure you can trust for the cup, decides how much of it goes in. If you cook from American recipes, the ExactCups converter gives the gram weight of a cup, tablespoon or teaspoon of more than 330 ingredients, with every source named.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free alternative to Yuka?

Open Food Facts is free, ad-free and run by volunteers, and its app shows the Nutri-Score, the NOVA processing group and allergen alerts. EWG's Healthy Living is free to scan, with comparison and ingredient preferences in a paid upgrade. SwapGenie is free for the first three months and checks every scan against your own allergens and diet from the first one, with no ads and no account.

Which grocery scanner app checks for allergies?

Fig and SwapGenie are built around the person scanning: Fig for complex restrictions such as low FODMAP, SwapGenie for scoring each product against the allergens and diet you set and suggesting a swap. Yuka's alerts for gluten, lactose, sulfites, soy and palm oil need Yuka Premium, Fooducate sells allergy checking as a $2.99 add-on, and Open Food Facts offers allergen alerts with a caution that they may not be complete. No app can flag a warning that is missing from its database, so read the pack when an allergy is serious.

Are the serving sizes in scanner apps accurate?

They are copied from the label, so they are as accurate as the label. The per-100-gram nutrition is usually sound, but the gram weight printed next to a spoon or cup measure is often a convention: water weight for sauces and spreads, 28 grams for a quarter cup of shredded cheese. ExactCups checks those weights against USDA data and physics and publishes every rejected figure in its corrections.