What is the best food scanner app?

Start from what you want the app to catch

Yuka

Yuka scans food and cosmetics and says its database holds about 4 million food products and 2 million cosmetics. Its food score is a published formula: nutritional quality 60%, additives 30%, organic certification 10%. It carries no ads and says no brand can influence a rating.

The core scan is free. An optional Premium tier — listed at €15 a year on Yuka's site, under what it calls open pricing — adds offline scanning, search without a barcode, food-preference alerts and a full year of history.

Where it is the wrong pick: seed oils are not a dimension of its score, and its nutrition weighting can mark down whole foods that are naturally high in fat or salt.

Fig

Fig is built for restricted diets. It says it supports more than 2,800 diets and allergies — Low FODMAP, gluten-free, low histamine, alpha-gal and so on — and returns whether a product fits yours rather than a general health score.

It is free to download; the Fig+ subscription unlocks unlimited scans, restaurants and multiple profiles for a household.

Where it is the wrong pick: it answers 'can I eat this', not 'how processed is this', and it is a food app only.

Bobby Approved

Bobby Approved is a free food scanner built around a list of more than 100 ingredients its team flags — natural and artificial flavours, sweeteners, dyes, seed oils, preservatives among them. A product either meets the standard or does not, with the flagged ingredients in red and suggested alternatives when it fails. You can also browse products by store.

Where it is the wrong pick: a pass/fail verdict does not tell you how far a product misses, and the standard is one team's list, so it suits you exactly as much as you agree with that list.

Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is the free, open-source, community-built database that several of these apps read from, and it publishes its own app. You get the ingredient list, Nutri-Score, NOVA processing group and preference-based matching, with no proprietary scoring layer.

Where it is the wrong pick: it leaves the interpretation to you, and a product the community has not photographed yet comes back incomplete.

Olive Detective

Olive Detective is this site's app. It reads the Open Food Facts database, treats seed oils as a first-class category (eleven oils, matched across languages), scores natural-first so whole foods are not punished for the fat or salt they naturally contain, and re-weights the score against the allergens and topics you choose to avoid. The same scan also handles cosmetics and dog and cat food, detected automatically, and reads the ingredients panel by camera when a barcode is not in the database.

Where it is the wrong pick: it is paid — a 7-day free trial, then $49.99 a year on iOS — while Yuka, Bobby Approved and Open Food Facts are free. Its contaminant flags are category-level, anchored to FDA monitoring, not lab tests of the product in your hand. And it inherits Open Food Facts' coverage gaps.

Before you pay for any of them

Scan five products you already buy and read the reasons each app gives. A scanner whose explanation you cannot check is asking for trust it has not earned, and every one of these apps is only as accurate as the ingredient list in its database. Prices and features above are as listed by each developer in October 2026.