Morning All,

At a moment when distrust in food companies and regulators is surging, when movements like RFK Jr.’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) are pushing consumers toward “cleaner” eating and data‑driven health tools, and when Big Food players are launching newly reformulated products every week, I’ve become fascinated by the French app Yuka and wanted to do a deep dive on it. From where I’m sitting, it’s one of the most important, least-understood forces reshaping how consumers interact with food and, by extension, how food companies formulate, market and defend their products. A few stats to consider:

• Launched in France in 2017 by Julie Chapon and brothers Benoit and François Martin

• More than 80 million users across 12 countries, 5 languages

• Used by 1 in 3 adults in its home market of France (22 million users)

• 5 million product ratings in food and personal care

• Over 8.3 billion product scans to date (2.7 billion scans in 2024 alone)

• 22–25 million US users since 2022 launch (now largest and fastest-growing market: 600,000 sign-ups/month

• At certain points in 2025, the app ranked ahead of MyFitnessPal and Strava on the App Store

• Over $7 million in sales to date without traditional marketing spend or in‑app ads; growth is entirely word-of-mouth

• Monetization comes from premium subscriptions for features like advanced search and dietary filters (US$10-15/month); no payments from brands or manufacturers so as to avoid compromised ratings.

Yuka rates products on a 0–100 scale using a proprietary methodology that is transparent in structure but opinionated in weighting:

• 60% of the score is based on nutritional quality (via the Nutri‑Score system, incorporating sugar, calories, sodium, saturated fat, protein, fibre and fruit/veg content),

• 30% on the presence of additives (with “high‑risk” additives hard‑capping a product at 49/100), and

• 10% on the “organic” dimension.

The output isn’t just a number; users see traffic‑light style labels (“excellent”, “good”, “mediocre”, “poor”) plus simple explanations and, crucially, suggested alternatives the app deems healthier.

Yuka’s magic ‘Call-out’ feature: For CPG and foodtech operators, the app’s power lies in its scoring engine and its built‑in reformulation pressure. From inside the app, users can directly ping brands with one click, sharing low product scores and urging reformulation, turning millions of shoppers into a distributed R&D feedback loop that many legacy manufacturers are most likely not set up to handle.

The impact is measurable. Intermarché, a major French retailer, reformulated over 900 products and removed 142 additives in direct response to poor Yuka ratings. In fact, 78% of French food manufacturers now factor Yuka scores into their product development and reformulation decisions.

For food technology folks, Yuka represents both a challenge and an opportunity. The app has effectively created a parallel credentialing system that operates outside traditional regulatory frameworks. Products that meet FDA requirements can still receive damning Yuka scores, creating reputational risk that legal compliance alone cannot mitigate.

Forward-thinking brands are beginning to treat Yuka as a product development input rather than a post-launch problem. It’s good business sense: reformulation costs are typically lower than the brand erosion that accompanies viral screenshots of poor scores. Plus, Yuka’s data shows 94% of users put back products with a red rating, and 92% report buying fewer ultra-processed foods since starting the app.

Either way, a nine‑year‑old French app with a small team, no VC war chest and ideological commitment to independence has become an unexpected gatekeeper in the food system’s shift toward transparency, and food companies and product R&D teams should be paying close attention.

-Sonalie

💡 Only On Green Queen

🔮 Green Queen’s 2026 Future Food Trends: Hybrid Everything, Longevity, GLP-1, Women’s Wellness, Kids’ Nutrition & More
At the forefront of the global future food ecosystem, Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras sets out the most important trends to watch every year. Here are her predictions for 2026.

🍄‍🟫 Exclusive: Maia Farms Takes Health-First Approach to Mushroom & Mycelium Ingredients
Canada’s Maia Farms will expand its specialty mushroom and mycelium ingredients, with a focus on functional and nutritional support, having secured C$3.75 million ($2.7 million) in new funding.

🤝🏼 Exclusive: Israel’s Aleph Farms Taps Singapore Manufacturer to Expand Cultivated Meat Across Asia-Pacific
Israeli cultivated meat startup Aleph Farms has partnered with contract manufacturer Cell Agritech and set up an entity in Singapore to serve as its Asia-Pacific hub.

🌱 Deep Dive: This Meat-Free Platform Brings Food Companies Together to Win Over ‘Open Omnivores’
Meat Free Made Easy, a UK campaign spearheaded by Plant Futures to help consumers eat less meat, launched a new platform that leverages collaborative marketing to attract more people to the plant-based sector.

✅ Must-Read Headlines

🧀 Finnish oat-based cheese startup Mö Foods, founded by sisters raised on a dairy farm, secured €2.4 million ($2.8 million) in funding to fuel its European expansion.
💡Mö Foods has based its operations in an old dairy facility in Central Ostrobothnia, Lohtaja, utilising conventional dairy equipment, and has won several awards for its cheeses.

☕️ Seoul-based Wake closed a pre-Series A funding round for its Sans beanless coffee, which marries traditional Korean fermentation techniques with “molecular hacking”.
💡The startup will use the new capital to open a beanless coffee store in New York City, followed by a “city by city” scale-up plan.

📉 Swedish startup Hooked Foods, known for its vegan seafood and chicken products, has declared bankruptcy after running out of cash.
💡The closure follows a few turbulent years for the business, coupled with the wider investment and consumer-level trials of the plant-based industry.

🌱 Vegan Food Group has closed its York office to focus on its plant-based factory in Germany, with VFC and Meatless Farm separating from the company, and Clive’s Purely Plants shutting down.
💡The holding company was set up in hopes of becoming “a vegan Unilever”, but the trials and tribulations of the plant-based sector have led to a rethink of its strategy and structure. 

🚫 A district judge has denied Texas’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by Upside Foods and Wildtype over its ban on cultivated meat, allowing the case to move forward.
💡The judge also denied the companies’ request for a preliminary injunction that would have allowed them to sell their products in Texas during the case, meaning the ban remains in effect for now.

🤝🏼 Partnerships & Projects

🧫 Backed by a $2.1 million state grant, Tufts University is set to open a future food innovation hub this year, complete with an open-source cell bank for cultivated meat research.
💡The Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture and the Good Food Institute have teamed up to salvage the IP of defunct cultivated meat firms and are making them publicly available for researchers.

🤖 Australian national research agency CSIRO and the UK’s University of Leeds are developing an AI tool that can convert food waste into sustainable protein, funded by $2 million from the Bezos Earth Fund.
💡The AI tool is being co-created with over 40 global stakeholders and trialled in three regional case studies. 

🌻 Dutch startup Time-Travelling Milkman has teamed up with Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre on a $700,000 EIT Food-backed project to create a plant protein from sunflower sidestreams.
💡Time-Travelling Milkman argues that sourcing European-grown sunflower seeds supports local agriculture, enhances traceability, shortens supply chains, and reduces dependence on imported soy.

🏭 German engineering company GEA has teamed up with Bio Fermentation Factory to deliver a precision and biomass fermentation line at the latter’s open-access facility in the Netherlands.
💡The facility will give companies access to food-grade infrastructure to test, validate and scale a range of fermentation-derived products, hopefully supporting faster commercialisation.

🚀 Everything Else In Future Food

🥤 Plant-based giant Beyond Meat has diversified past food for the first time, launching a line of clear protein drinks called Beyond Immerse to support gut and muscle health.

🏨 Indian vegan startup GoodDot Foods has teamed up with Hilton, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, to host a Pan-India Plant Protein Culinary Festival across its hotels during Veganuary.

🥛 President Trump has signed the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act into law, which includes provisions to make it easier to access non-dairy milk in school meals.

💰 Green Queen Wire: Vancouver-based Maia Farms closed an oversubscribed $3.75 million seed round to scale production and expand its mushroom and mycelium-based food ingredients globally.

🌱🍔  Future Food Quick Bites 

In our weekly column, Future Food Quick Bites, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Just Egg’s Germany debut, Oatly’s latest fashion collab, and HappyCow’s 2026 vegan index.

📆 Scene & Heard

🚀 Don’t Miss the 10th Edition of Future Food Asia!

🇬🇧 Future Food Asia marks its 10th edition in Singapore on 12th-13th May, bringing together the region’s agrifood leaders to drive real impact across food, bioeconomy, and sustainability through bold ideas, collaboration, and collective action. Learn more here.

Future Food-Tech San Francisco, taking place March 19th-20th, will bring together global food leaders, innovators, and investors for two days of breakthrough insights, live product discovery, and high-impact partnerships shaping a healthy, sustainable future. Sign up here.

Bridge2Food Europe 2026 lands in Copenhagen 9th-11th June, uniting Course Europe and Summit Europe in one must-attend event for alternative protein leaders to connect, collaborate, and shape the future of the industry. Find out more here.

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