On my last visit to see my step-mom, she turned me on to a great new app.  Scan the barcode of any grocery item or cosmetic and YUKA will rank its safety on a scale from Poor to Excellent.  The ranking provides info on nutrition — sugars, sodium, saturated fats, calories, as well as hazardous substances and/or additives. There’s also a note about which products are organic or not.

Not every product in a single brand receives the same ranking. A facewash by Acure received a great ranking while another product by the same company did not. Some prepared sauces in my fridge rank “poor”.  No surprise there. The preponderance of what’s in our pantry ranks good and excellent.  A tablespoon of a terrible hoisin sauce every now and then?  Not much to fear. When a product comes up substandard, YUKA offers healthier options to choose from.

There’s a paid version that allows you to enter the name of any product without scanning a bar code; for my purposes, that doesn’t seem necessary. Here are two examples of what you’ll see when you use the app:

Why do they call it YUKA? AI weighed in:                                                                                                                                                                                             “The name for the Yuka app came from the Yucatán region in Mexico, which is the home state of the wife of one of the co-founders, Benoît. When the French founders were developing the app and needed a name for a startup competition pitch, they brainstormed and quickly settled on Yuka as a placeholder to honor the region. The name grew on them and they decided to keep it. Initially, the project was even nicknamed. ‘The connected Carrot.’ [ergo the thumbnail image of a carrot]

Try it out. See what you think. They accept no endorsements from any manufacturers. Here’s to healthy eating.

photos courtesy of Debra Darvick