Yuka: a product deep-dive into the app reshaping your shopping habits

A remarkable case study in early product market fit and how it can be further improved

As 2024 rolls in, I found myself thinking about leading a healthier life. This led me to use Yuka, an app that’s all about helping you make healthier choices.

Here’s something cool about Yuka: It reached 1 million users the first year of launch back in 2017. Now at 40 million, Yuka is a remarkable case study in product market fit. Yuka has the potential to revolutionize the shopping experience for all of us.

I’ve spent some time dissecting and playing with Yuka, turning it over like an interesting puzzle. There are great nuggets here that anyone working in product can learn from Yuka’s success. I am also providing some ideas on what Yuka can consider to delight the user.

If you want to read more articles like this to break into product check out the Break Into Product Medium Publication here

1. What is Yuka?

The Yuka app is a free mobile application that allows users to scan food and cosmetic products to assess their health impact. It provides a simple rating system, indicating the quality of products based on nutritional information, presence of additives, and organic status for food items. It provides alternative recommendations to use when the ratings are low.

Yuka prides itself on being 100% independent from external influence when providing health assessments on products. The app does not show any ads and claims to not be compensated by brands or manufacturers to promote their products.

Vision: Through informed purchasing, consumers will be able to leverage their buying power to drive the agro-food and cosmetics industries towards improving their product’s composition.

2. Interesting Stats

• # of downloads: 40 million
• Inventory: 2 million food products and 1 million cosmetic products
• 3 million barcodes scanned every day [2]
• 94% of Yuka users stopped buying certain products [3]
• 90% of users consider that Yuka can influence brands and manufacturers to make better products [3]

3. Who are the users?

This is a two-sided market including consumers and brands. Here are key user segments:

4. User Experience: Pluses and Minuses

Onboarding & User Education

🙂 What works here:

As soon as the user logs in, they find a welcome message with a friendly face in the shape of a carrot character. The friendly character helps lighten up the task of signing up which is why I think it was good to have the character added in the sign up page.

The onboarding is short and sweet with only 2 pages, creating awareness on what to expect with the product. The use of images to describe the value users will get is helpful to move quickly through these pages. According to Retently.com, poor onboarding is responsible for 23% of the average customer churn. This is why it is so important to get this part right.

Lesson #1: Make the awareness pages during the onboarding short and sweet to reduce time-to-value for users. Help the user get the gist of the message by adding helpful images. Adding a progress bar to show how soon they will exit helps set expectations.

Lesson #2: Not all users will want an in-app guided experience. It is important to give the option to skip the awareness pages to get right into signing up.

🙁 What did not work:

The welcome page is the first page the user sees once they download the app. The friendly character helps welcome users into the product. However the comment under the welcome text lacks definitive wording to help the user picture how the app will change their life, helping them get closer to the aha! moment.

Lesson #3: You only have a few seconds to make a good first impression when the users first open the app. Yuka could do a better job at reminding the user of the value they signed up for in the first place rather than regurgitating what the app does. Using definitive narrative to help the user visualize what they will get out of the app helps.

The user is given the only option to sign in using e-mail. I am dreading creating a password that I will later forget. Even though I have a password manager installed on my phone, it still takes effort to go through the process to create a password that I can store for this app. We should try to remove as much cognitive load from the user so they can get on the app as soon as possible.

Lesson #4: To speed up the sign in process, Yuka should consider adding single sign on using at a minimum Apple, Google, and Facebook to make sign ups run smoothly. This reduces friction on the user and makes it easier for them to move on to use the app.

Scanning & Recommendations

🙂 What works here:

The core action that adds value to the user in the Yuka app is scanning products. Scanning is simple and intuitive. After scanning I can easily identify if the product is a healthy choice by inspecting the bottom pop up with the colored rating. I can then easily move on to scan another product since I never left the scan page. This makes it super intuitive to use as I am looking at various products in the supermarket aisle. If I want to see why the rating is low, I can always click on the pop up window to read the details.

The aha! moment for me using the app came up after I scanned the product and was able to see better recommendations. By clicking on the ‘i’ icon in the list of ingredients, I was able to read and learn that Sodium lauryl sulfate, for example, is a well known irritant. Given I use this product at home with kids, I immediately clicked on the recommendations list to see that there were better options to consider. I was delighted to find a much better option.

🙁 What did not work:

Most products will have a barcode on their surface to scan. However, I found some products do not have a barcode in their product but rather in the box in which they were received. Most of us will not have the box anymore once we are using the product. When a new user gets the Yuka app, they will most probably start scanning the products they are already using at home. There were also products I scanned that were not found by Yuka. Not being able to scan may cause frustration in the user leading them to quit the app if this happens often enough.

Lesson #5: Yuka should look at leveraging computer vision to identify the packaging of the product rather than restrict identification only through barcodes. This will increase the chances that products are identified. There is more to say here about how unidentified products can be input by the user for analysis, see lesson #8 for further details.

After identifying an alternative product to use, the user experience in the Yuka app will tend to end. This is because the user will then go outside of the app to order the product. This is a missed opportunity because we can add further value to the user by helping them identify which of the better options is the best to select, where to buy the product, and come back to review it.

Lesson #6: Yuka should consider adding features after recommendations are given to the user to help them make a decision based on their needs. Yuka could also add more value to the user by helping them find the product without leaving the app. It could also garner product reviews for users in the app which would significantly differ from generalized reviews in external shopping platforms. Adding further value to the user helps increase user engagement and retention.

Users will often want to share the better options they are making with others like relatives and friends. To help the product grow in a more organic way, Yuka should consider enabling users to share their healthier choices in social media and through text and chat with contacts. This is a missed opportunity for product-led growth.

Lesson #7: Users will tend to share when they get insights and find value. Apps should enable ways for people to share with their network to help spread word of mouth and reach virality.

Unknown Product Onboarding

🙂 What works here:

We discussed that unidentified scanned products could cause frustration for the user. Yuka has a flow to help users onboard products they do not find. Almost immediately after I submit it, I get an email letting me know whether they were able to analyze the product (although in my case no product was identified).

🙁 What did not work:

The flow to enter an unidentified product was intuitive and made sense. However, it was a bit long. Besides selecting a category and uploading a page, I also had to enter some manual information about the product (not shown in image above). I was tempted to quit this process as it was time consuming. Asking the user for manual entry of product information to me seemed unnecessary since I had already taken a picture of the product. Having users input unidentified products is a key action that helps augment the product database for Yuka organically.

Lesson #8: Look for opportunities to augment your information database organically with the help of users. This data will probably need cleansing and reviewing before making it official in the app but if we enable the right process for the input of data we should get what we need. Make sure to make the input of data as easy as possible for the user to remove friction and to improve the chance of accurate data, in this example we could use the help of computer vision to identify the product which we can further research in the backend (no need for manual data entry).

8. Conclusions

Yuka grew quickly to 1 million users in their first year of launch back in 2017 to 40 million in 2023. Yuka is a remarkable case study in product market fit. Yuka is set to revolutionize our shopping experience by helping us analyze food and cosmetic products and choose healthier alternatives directly impacting and changing our lives. Yuka then also holds the power to steer manufacturers and brands to change how they manufacture products to help people’s lives. There is a ton the product is doing well but I have come up with a few ideas to take it a step further on user delight.

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I will return with another interesting product to dive into.If you have any suggestions, ping me on LinkedIn here.