Crunchy & Co

BY FAR, the hardest part of being crunchy or non toxic is the time it takes to research everything that is trying to kill you. Most of us don’t have time to become part-time scientists or nutritionists, so that’s when we turn to technology. These apps will help you make better food choices by weeding out toxic ingredients. In this article, we review 3 options and recommend what we believe is the best food scanner app available right now.

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What to look for in a food scanner app

First, we know there are dozens and dozens of apps out there related to healthy eating. However, you will find most of those apps are geared toward dieting. They are designed to count calories, identify allergens, track points or view nutrition facts. And while they are designed well for those purposes, they usually do not meet the needs of the crunchy community. We want to know:

• Does the food contain artificial ingredients?
• Does the food contain additives?
• What are the toxicity risks associated with this food?

To get those questions answered, there are far less options in the app store. And there’s more to it than just shopping organic. Even organic foods (especially boxed ones) can contain less than ideal ingredients. Take this organic canola oil, for example. Sure, it’s organic, but at the end of the day it is still an inflammatory oil that is just not as beneficial as say coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil or ghee butter. What you place inside your body, arguably does the most harm to your health so it’s important to become aware of what you are consuming. We’ve identified 3 apps we think will certainly make clean food shopping much easier for you:

1. Open Food Facts
2. Sift
3. Yuka

For each app, we will scan the exact same product so you can see the exact differences between each of these options. The product we used to test each application, Skittles, is a toxic product we would never recommend, but it helps show you how it interprets ingredients, especially bad ones:

Open Food Facts: Food Scanner App Review

Open Food Facts is an open-source app, which means users like you, submit information. Sort of like Wikipedia.

The app allows users to scan barcodes or search for specific food items to access detailed nutritional facts, ingredient lists, and even potential allergens. By providing access to crowdsourced data and collaborative input from users worldwide, Open Food Facts empowers consumers to make informed decisions about their food choices. The app goes beyond basic nutritional information, offering insights into the product’s environmental impact, ethical considerations, and various nutritional ratings. It uses a few ratings:

• The Nutri-Score grade, from A to E, for nutritional quality (A is the best rating)
• The NOVA group, from 1 to 4 for level of processed foods (Group 4 is ultra-processed, 3-processed, 2-processed culinary ingredient, 1-unprocessed or minimally processed)
• An eco-score to rate its environmental impact.

Photo credit: Apple app store

First, we love that this app is always free. There is not even a paid option, which means you get access to everything the app has when you download it. It has an impressive database at over 2 million products list. It does an excellent job at listing the ingredients, but not necessarily describing them. So you’ll need to know what you are looking at in order to decipher if the food is a clean option or not. In addition, the overwhelming majority of the products don’t have the eco score, so if that’s important to you, this app doesn’t quite achieve that.

All in all, however, if you just want to know what’s in your food, this app delivers and does it for free.

Here is how it scanned Skittles:

Sift: Food Scanner App Review

Sift is a user-friendly option. It breaks down ingredients and explains them in layman terms. It even chimes in with some geo-political data such as letting you know if the ingredient is banned in certain countries. It also groups the ingredients into categories which helps you more easily understand what you are looking at, especially when it’s a very long ingredient list. Our favorite feature is that it will identify additives for you, as well as which sugars are used. In addition, it features pre-sets to help you identify food labels according to your diet or allergen, such as:

• Whole foods diet
• Dairy free
• Gluten free
• No added sugar
• Paleo
• Soy free
• Vegan
• and more…

Photo Credit: Apple app store

The downside of this app is that it’s probably the most expensive option on this list. They do give you 5 free scans per month, but that’s hardly enough to get any real value out of it. So if you like this app, it’s basically necessary for you to upgrade to $2.99/month. What’s more is that there are even other costs if you want to unlock more features, like asking it to help you track a specific diet. For that, you’ll need to shell out $39.99 per year. In addition, it requires a scan/barcode as there is no search feature. Lastly, it does not provide any sort of rating, so if you need that sort of guidance, it’s not available here.

Here is how it scanned Skittles:

Yuka: Food Scanner App Review

The Yuka app was developed in France by a team of three co-founders: Julie Chapon, Benoît Martin, and François Martin. They launched the app in 2017 with the goal of helping consumers make informed choices about the products they buy. The inspiration for Yuka came from the founders’ desire to address the lack of transparency and understanding surrounding the ingredients in food and personal care products. They aimed to create a tool that could decode complex labels and provide users with clear and reliable information. On their website, they claim complete independence. The app is ad-free and information is obtained independently with “absolutely no influence from outside brands”.

Yuka provides a breakdown of the major ingredients, including any additives, preservatives, or controversial substances present. You can click into each ingredient and read more about why it was rated no risk, low risk or high risk. It then assigns a rating to the product on a scale of 0 to 100, indicating its overall quality and potential impact on health. Additionally, Yuka offers alternative product recommendations that are healthier and more aligned with the user’s preferences.

Photo Credit: Apple app store

The free version of this app will open up the scanning, but not the search, meaning you must physically have a bar code to scan in order to get information about a particular product. You do have the option to upgrade to the paid version, which opens up the search feature. With the search feature, you can look up any product by name or even category. Yuka let’s you decide the price you will pay for the annual membership. When you upgrade, you will have the option to toggle from $8.99 up to $18.49 per year. You literally set your own price. This is Yuka’s way of making its feature available to more people.

The best part about Yuka is how user-friendly it is. When it alerts you of a bad ingredient, it will explain to you the risk associated with it. In addition, when you scan a low rated product, it will recommend alternatives which makes it much easier for you to find something similar that is healthier.

Unlike Open Food Facts, however, it does not list every ingredient. So if you’re wanting to read the full label, you won’t get that here. We also caution about relying solely on the 0 to 100 rating. The app is not rating solely on toxicity, but also on nutrition. Therefore, a perfectly clean eating ice cream bar might receive a low rating due to its sugar content. However, if you are eating ice cream, you already know it contains sugar, you truly just want to know if it contains other toxic or artificial chemicals. So we’ve learned not to pay too much attention to the 0-100 rating, and instead simply interpret the ingredients, which YUKA does an excellent job at dumbing down for us mortals.

Here is how it scanned Skittles:

Our Favorite Food Scanner App

The win definitely goes to YUKA. Not only does it work for both food and beauty products, but it is extremely easy to understand, which helps you make decisions fast (we don’t exactly have 2 hours to spend at the grocery store!). Their free version offers so much and probably works just fine for most people. But if you do a lot of shopping online, you may want to upgrade to the paid version so that you can utilize the search feature (you don’t always have a barcode when you’re shopping online).

Disclaimer

As a closing comment, we do want to warn you that while these apps are helpful, they are not absolute truth. Ratings vary because, well, standards vary. In the end, these apps are developed by people, and even within the crunchy community, we all have varying degrees of standards. It is also impossible for these apps to factor in every medical study. So yes… they are helpful in getting started and getting familiar with ingredients, but they aren’t the end-all of your toxin-free education.

Bonus App: Think Dirty

We’re going to share one more app with you, but it’s not intended for food. It’s for cosmetics. What gets absorbed into your body is just as important as what you eat and swallow. So while you’re downloading apps, we highly recommend this next one to shop clean beauty and personal care products.

The Think Dirty app is a revolutionary tool designed to empower consumers and promote conscious purchasing decisions in the realm of personal care and beauty products. The app allows users to scan the barcodes of their favorite products or search for specific items, revealing detailed information about their ingredients and potential health risks. It utilizes a rating system that ranges from 0 to 10 (0 being the cleanest and 10 being the most toxic) and highlights potential harmful substances.

Photo credit: Apple app store

It’s origin story is pretty cool. The Think Dirty app was created by Lily Tse. She developed the app in 2012 after her own personal experience with breast cancer, aiming to raise awareness about potentially harmful ingredients in personal care products and provide consumers with information to make safer choices. Lily Tse founded Think Dirty Inc. and continues to lead its mission of promoting transparency and empowering consumers in the beauty industry. If you are really into makeup, I have to say getting Think Dirty is non-negotiable. However, I don’t think the free version does enough, so you would definitely need to upgrade to the paid plan to get the most out of it.

Download these apps today and save yourself countless hours!