Nime vs Yuka

Two barcode food scanners have much of the EU consumer attention in 2026: Yuka, the French app that pioneered the category in 2017, and Nime, launching now. Both scan a barcode and return a score from 0 to 100 where higher is better. On the surface they look like the same product.

The difference sits underneath, and it’s a simple one: Yuka tells you how good a product is. Nime tells you how good it is for you.This page lays the two out side by side. We’ve tried to be fair — the goal is to help you decide which approach you trust, not to argue that one is universally better.

At a glance

What Yuka does

Yuka launched in France in 2017 and effectively created the consumer food-scanning category in Europe. The proposition was simple: point your phone at any barcode and see a single number telling you how good the product is. That simplicity is what made it work, and it’s why Yuka became a household name across much of the EU.

Yuka’s score is a weighted blend, led by nutritional quality, with additive risk as a significant secondary factor and a bonus for certified-organic products. Yuka publishes its weighting openly, which is unusual for the category and earns the app a lot of justified trust — and because those weightings are theirs to state and to change, we’d point you at Yuka’s own methodology rather than have you rely on our summary of it.

The app covers both food and cosmetics — you can scan a shampoo bottle and get an ingredient breakdown the same way you scan a yoghurt. There is a free tier covering unlimited barcode scans and a paid tier for offline access, history features and additional ingredient detail.

The one thing Yuka deliberately does notdo is adapt the number to the individual. A product’s Yuka score is a property of the product. That is a legitimate design choice: it makes scores comparable between friends, shareable in a screenshot, and easy to reason about.

What Nime does differently

Nime starts from the opposite premise: that “is this good?” has no single answer, because it depends on who is asking. Someone managing blood sugar, someone with a nut allergy and someone training for a marathon are not looking at the same jar in the same way.

So Nime computes the score from four weighted components — nutrition (45%), additives (25%), processing (15%) and contaminants (15%) — and then applies your profile on top. The full method is documented at /scoring. In practice, three things set it apart:

• The score is weighted to your profile.Flag diabetes and the sugar term counts double. Flag high blood pressure and salt counts double. Pregnancy raises the weight on at-risk additives. These aren’t filters applied after the fact — they change the arithmetic that produces the number.
• You set the caution level.A Relaxed / Balanced / Strict setting scales the precautionary parts of the score, the additives and processing terms. If you think most food apps are alarmist, turn it down. If you’d rather err careful, turn it up. Nime doesn’t make that call for you.
• Allergens and diet are absolute, not gentle. Something on your allergen list flags the product and caps the score regardless of how good the nutrition looks. A non-vegan item on a vegan profile gets a named flag, never a silent deduction.

Alongside that, Nime writes a plain-English line for every item on the ingredient list — what it is, what it does in the product, what current EFSA and research say about it — where Yuka surfaces additive names with a risk indicator. And every Nime score opens into its parts, showing which grams and which of your own settings moved it, plus a confidence level when the underlying data is thin.

The same cereal, two people

This is the difference in one example. Take a sweetened wholegrain breakfast cereal: 22g sugar, 6g fibre, 8g protein and 0.9g salt per 100g, containing BHT (E321), ultra-processed.

For someone with no specific health flags on the Balanced setting, Nime lands around 64— high in sugar, but the wholegrain fibre and protein pull it back up. For someone managing diabetes on Strict, the same box lands around 41, because the sugar term doubles and becomes the dominant factor.

Yuka would return one number here, the same one for both shoppers. Neither approach is dishonest — they answer different questions. Yuka answers “how good is this product?” Nime answers “how good is this product for me?”

Where the two overlap

It’s worth being clear that these apps are not opposites. Both are nutrition-led: nutrition is the largest single component in Nime’s score and the leading factor in Yuka’s. Both treat additives as a real second axis rather than an afterthought, and both classify them by risk rather than simply counting them.

Nime grades every E-number into one of four tiers using EFSA re-evaluations and ANSES advisories — the post on emulsifiers walks through one category in depth. Nime also measures processing explicitly using the NOVA framework, but keeps that weight modest and adjusts it by category, rather than penalising every ultra-processed food equally. The high-protein category is one place where that distinction changes the answer.

Where Yuka still wins

A few things to be honest about.

Maturity and trust. Yuka has been at this since 2017, with a stable product and a brand most EU shoppers already recognise. Nime is launching now. If a long track record matters to you, Yuka has earned its position.

Cosmetics coverage.Yuka scans cosmetics; Nime does not. If you want one app for food and personal care, Yuka covers ground Nime currently doesn’t.

Geographic reach. Yuka is live in many markets. Nime launches in five EU locales. Outside those five, Yuka is currently broader.

Comparability and simplicity. Because a Yuka score is a property of the product, two people can compare scores directly and a screenshot means the same thing to everyone who sees it. A personalised score is more useful to you and less portable between people. If all you want is one fast, shareable signal, that simplicity is a genuine advantage.

Which one is right for you

Honest framing, not a sales pitch.

• You have a condition, allergy or diet that changes what matters: this is exactly what Nime is built for. A generic score can’t tell you that the sugar in this box is a bigger problem for you than for the person next to you.
• You want one number everyone can compare: Yuka’s shelf-wide score is the better fit.
• You scan cosmetics as well as food: Yuka covers both; Nime is food-only.
• You want to know what an ingredient actually is: Nime translates every item on the label into a sentence a non-specialist can read.
• You’re a long-time Yuka user: keep using it. Running both for a few weeks is a reasonable way to see whether a profile-weighted score changes any of your decisions.

The honest summary: Yuka and Nime solve adjacent problems. Yuka is simpler, broader and more mature, and its score is comparable between people. Nime is deeper on food specifically, explains every ingredient in plain language, and weights the answer to your own health profile. Which of those you want is a question only you can answer.

Frequently asked questions

Try Nime when it launches

Nime is in pre-launch. Join the early-access waitlistand we’ll let you know when the app is ready on iOS and Android. Read the full scoring pageif you want to understand exactly how the score is built — and how your own profile changes it — before you sign up.