Yuka: The Reformulation Pressure Food Producers Didn’t Vote For

Yuka: the reformulation pressure food producers didn’t vote for (and why UPP is built for it)

Food companies are used to scrutiny. But the source of scrutiny is changing.

For most of the modern food system, legitimacy came from compliance: ingredient declarations, nutrition panels, and the fact a product met regulatory requirements. That framework still matters. But it no longer determines trust.

A growing share of consumers are outsourcing judgement to apps that sit outside the regulatory system entirely. One of the most influential is the French app Yuka.

It’s often described as a “food scanning” app. In practice, it functions more like a parallel credentialing system — one that is increasingly shaping what gets bought, what gets stocked, and what gets reformulated.

And that matters directly to the kind of upstream ingredient work UPP exists to enable.

A small app with outsized reach

Yuka launched in France in 2017. It now has more than 80 million users across 12 countries and 5 languages. In its home market, it’s used by roughly 1 in 3 adults (22 million users). In the US — where it launched in 2022 — it has reached 22–25 million users, and is now its largest and fastest-growing market, adding around 600,000 sign-ups per month.

It has processed more than 8.3 billion product scans to date (including 2.7 billion scans in 2024 alone), and built a database of 5 million product ratings across food and personal care.

The more important point is not the exact numbers. It’s what the numbers represent: Yuka has become a default layer of interpretation between the shelf and the shopper — without relying on traditional marketing or advertising. Growth is largely word-of-mouth.

That’s a sign of structural adoption, not a niche trend.

How Yuka scores food (and why it creates pressure)

Yuka assigns products a score from 0–100. The methodology is transparent in structure but opinionated in weighting:

60% nutritional quality, based on Nutri-Score

30% additives, with “high-risk” additives hard-capping a product at 49/100

10% organic dimension

Users don’t just see a score. They see a simple judgement (“excellent”, “good”, “mediocre”, “poor”) plus suggested alternatives.

This is where the commercial impact compounds. Yuka doesn’t just inform consumers. It redirects demand.

A product can be fully compliant and still become commercially fragile if it is scored poorly by a system consumers increasingly trust more than packaging claims or regulatory thresholds.

The part most manufacturers underestimate: the feedback loop

Yuka’s most consequential feature isn’t the rating.

It’s the mechanism that turns consumer dissatisfaction into direct reformulation pressure.

From inside the app, users can message brands with one click, sharing low product scores and urging reformulation. That turns millions of consumers into a distributed, always-on feedback loop.

Historically, reformulation pressure came from a small number of places:

regulators

retail buyers

internal nutrition targets

NGOs and media cycles

Yuka adds something different: persistent, product-specific scrutiny at the point of purchase, applied at scale, and repeated every day.

For producers, that changes the cost of inaction. It also changes the timeline. This isn’t a once-a-year strategy discussion. It’s a live operational risk.

Why this matters: reformulation is no longer just innovation. It’s defence.

Reformulation is often framed as innovation: new ingredients, new claims, new launches.

In reality, reformulation tends to fail for a more basic reason: it introduces too much friction into systems that are already under pressure.

Food manufacturers are balancing cost volatility, labour constraints, retailer scrutiny, Scope 3 accountability, and increasingly conservative capital environments — while maintaining taste, texture, safety, and margin.

High-friction reformulation introduces compounding risks: changes to processing lines, new allergen or regulatory complexity, uncertain supply at scale, sensory uncertainty, and additional approval cycles with retailers.

This is why many reformulation programmes quietly revert to incremental tweaks, even when bigger changes would be strategically smarter.

Yuka accelerates that reality. It makes the downside of “good enough” more visible.

Why this connects directly to UPP

At UPP, we’ve always assumed the food system won’t change through consumer behaviour alone.

Public health already tells us that behaviour change is unreliable — even when the stakes are personal health. So it’s unrealistic to expect consumers to overhaul their diets to reduce carbon emissions, improve nutrition, or avoid ultra-processing.

That doesn’t make consumers the problem.

It makes system design the problem.

Yuka doesn’t contradict that view. It reinforces it — from the opposite direction.

Consumers aren’t being asked to become perfect. They’re being given a tool that makes certain products feel harder to trust, and nudges them toward “cleaner” formulation logic. Whether or not you agree with Yuka’s weighting, the direction of travel is clear:

shorter ingredient lists

fewer additives that sound synthetic or unnecessary

more nutrition per bite

more explainable inputs

The industry can treat this as a communications challenge, but it’s more accurately a formulation and systems challenge.

And this is where UPP’s model becomes relevant.

UPP works upstream, taking under-utilised vegetables and converting them into food-grade protein and fibre ingredients that integrate into mainstream manufacturing. The goal isn’t to create novelty. It’s to remove friction.

Because the fastest way to improve food isn’t to ask consumers to change what they buy. It’s to improve what goes into the products they already buy — quietly, at scale, without disrupting production reality.

Low-friction reformulation isn’t a “nice to have” anymore. It’s becoming a strategic requirement.

What “Yuka-proofing” actually looks like

For most producers, the practical response to Yuka isn’t to optimise for a perfect score. It’s to reduce the surface area of vulnerability:

simplify ingredient systems where possible

replace fragmented additive stacks with more integrated, crop-derived functionality

increase protein and fibre density without making products heavier or harder to tolerate

improve label familiarity without sacrificing performance

In other words: reformulate in ways that don’t break the system.

This is exactly why familiarity and integration matter. Ingredients that behave predictably in standard manufacturing processes, arrive with procurement-grade documentation, and can replace multiple functions at once are more adoptable than technically impressive solutions that introduce operational risk.

Closing thought: a parallel credentialing system is now in play

Yuka has created a parallel credentialing system that influences consumer choice regardless of what regulators permit.

For food producers, the question isn’t whether Yuka’s scoring is fair.

It’s whether your products can withstand scrutiny from systems you don’t control.

In that environment, the winning strategy isn’t loud disruption. It’s quiet upstream improvement: better nutrition density, fewer unnecessary additives, simpler ingredient logic, and reformulation that fits existing manufacturing constraints.

That is what UPP is built to enable.

Quiet change. Upstream. At scale.