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This episode of Food for Thought Leadership features Julie Chapon, CEO and co-founder of Yuka, the fast-growing app that helps consumers better understand the health impact of food and cosmetic products. Chapon shares the origin story of Yuka, which began as a personal mission to decode confusing food labels and has since expanded into a global platform with over 80 million users. The conversation explores how the app works, its commitment to independence from advertising and manufacturers, and its dual mission: empowering consumers to make healthier choices while pushing brands toward product reformulation.
The discussion also dives into Yuka’s research on the U.S. food system, highlighting how lower-cost processed foods often contain significantly more additives, sugar, and salt—raising concerns about the link between income and access to healthier options. Chapon explains how consumer distrust, misleading packaging claims, and the “health halo” effect contribute to confusion at the shelf. The episode closes with a look at Yuka’s advocacy tools, including its “call-out” feature, and how collective consumer pressure is already driving meaningful change in product formulations across markets.
What Yuka Is & How It Started
Julie Chapon: “So Yuka is an app that scanned the barcode of food and cosmetic products to analyze the impact on your health.”
“It has been created in 2016 and launched in 2017 so almost 10 years ago and today, Yuka is present in 12 countries and has 80 million users.” “And maybe one last important thing is that Yuka is a 100% independent app.”
“Well, everything started with my co founder… he was trying to pay more attention to the food he was buying for his kids, but he quickly realized that food labels were really difficult to understand.”
“There were all these complicated names, and the nutritional values were not easy to make sense of.”
“So he thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that could very quickly and easily decipher and analyze all this information and tell you right away if a product is good or not for your heads.”
“So basically, the idea of Yuga was truly born from a personal need of a father for his children.”
Mission & Consumer Empowerment
Julie Chapon: “Well, I generally say that our mission is twofold first… we want to help consumers make better choices for the health by providing better transparency.”
“But there is a second layer to our mission… which is to empower consumers so that by changing their purchasing habits, they can push manufacturers to improve what’s in the product.”
“That’s what we managed to do in Europe, where hundreds of manufacturers have reformulated the product thanks to the app.”
Why Consumers Care More Now
Julie Chapon: “I think it’s quite new… over the past 10 years… consumer distrust in the food industry has been steadily rising, fueled by a lot of health scandals and product recalls.”
“So this consumer distrust has been really rising, and people have started trying to understand what they were actually eating and buying.”
Business Model & Independence
Julie Chapon: “The most important thing to understand is… we are 100% independent, and we don’t take any money from brands or manufacturers.”
“Also, there is absolutely no ad in the app, and we don’t sell our users data.”
“Our only revenue comes from our users through the premium version of the app.”
“It’s $10 a year… and to give you an idea, in the U.S., 3% of our users are premium members.”
Research Additives and Cost
Julie Chapon: “We made that huge study across 800 US product with the Harvard Law School.”
“I was especially surprised… for basic like bread… the cheapest breads have an average four times more additive than the most expensive breads.”
“When you look at the cheapest breads in the US, they contain an average of nine additives per product.”
“The pattern repeats across every single category we looked at.”
“The products without high risk additives cost on average, 63% more.” “The cheapest ones contain 73% more sugar than the most expensive ones.”
“If you can’t afford to spend more, you are like automatically exposed to more harmful ingredients.”
What Users Discover
Julie Chapon: “We receive about 500 emails every day.”
“Many people think that they are making a healthy choice because there is a nice packaging, but when they scan the product, they realize that what’s inside there’s a very different story.”
“These claims… create what we call a health halo effect.” “One positive claim on the front of the pack makes you feel the whole product is healthy.”
“So when people scan those products… they are genuinely shocked.”
U.S. Versus Europe
Julie Chapon: “American products contain much more additive than in many other countries.”
“We can find twice as many additives as compared to Italian products, and 70% more additives… than French products.”
“These numbers show that it’s absolutely possible to make food with far fewer additives.”
Call Out Feature and Impact
Julie Chapon: “The call out feature… allows users to call out a brand using a high risk additives.”
“We really believe that consumers are not just passive scanners, they can be true agents of change.”
“More than 1.5 million call outs have been done.” “When 1000s of users send the same message, it becomes very hard for a brand to ignore.”
“We have already seen product reformulations happen as a direct result of this feature.”
Looking Ahead
Julie Chapon: “I definitely believe that consumer can have a huge power and can definitely shift things.”
“Brands contact us daily to let us know that they have reformulated the products.” “In France, 78% of food manufacturers take their Yuka score into account for the product formulations.” “Manufacturers remove them simply because consumers don’t want them anymore.”
