The best food scanner apps

A note on this page before the list

This is a ranking on a website belonging to one of the apps in it, so the ordering is worth explaining. We have put Optimally fifth. It launched on 18 August 2026, it has close to no ratings, and four of the apps below are free to scan with where it is not. Ranking ourselves first would be the normal thing to do here and it would not survive thirty seconds of checking.

Rating counts come from each app’s US App Store listing on 14 September 2026. Yuka’s scoring weights come from Yuka’s own help pages.

1. Yuka

99,347 ratings at 4.8. Free to scan, with a paid tier covering search and offline use.

Scores food 60% on nutritional quality using Nutri-Score, 30% on additives and 10% on organic status, and covers cosmetics as well. Scale is the reason it ranks first: a stated 4 million food and 2 million cosmetic products. If your priority is that the app finds what you scanned, start here.

The main objection to it is the method. Degree of processing is not one of its criteria, so an engineered product that hits good macros can score well, unless it contains an additive Yuka rates high-risk, which caps it at 49.

2. Bobby Approved

160,584 ratings at 4.9. Free.

Checks products against a list of more than a hundred ingredients its creator considers harmful, and highlights the failures in red. Fast and unambiguous in a shop.

It is one person’s list, presented as a verdict. That is a strength if you share the premise and a weakness if you want to see the reasoning, and a binary result cannot tell you how close a product came.

3. Fooducate

77,542 ratings at 4.6. Free, with a premium tier. Running since 2010.

Really a food diary with grading attached. If you want to track intake as well as check products, it is the one on this list built to do both. If you only want to check a label, it is more app than you need.

4. Open Food Facts

The non-profit open database that a number of scanners, Optimally included, are built on, with its own free app. No paid tier, no advertising, no account needed to look things up, and the whole dataset is downloadable.

It gives you Nutri-Score and the NOVA group rather than a single verdict, so more of the interpreting is left to you.

5. Optimally

Ours. Effectively no ratings, live since 18 August 2026, and it requires a subscription where four of the five above do not.

What it does differently: degree of processing decides the score rather than informing it, so an ultra-processed product is capped at 49 however good its macros, and its main rules link the published study behind them inside the app.

That is a narrow advantage and it matters to a narrow group: people who think degree of processing is what a score should be measuring. If you are not in that group, one of the four above is a better app for you today.

Common questions

Which food scanner app is free?

Bobby Approved and Open Food Facts are free to use. Yuka and Fooducate are free to scan with and charge for some features. Optimally requires a subscription.

Which has the largest database?

Yuka states 4 million food products and 2 million cosmetics. Fooducate describes its database as hundreds of thousands of products, and Bobby Approved gives no figure in its listing.

Do they agree with each other?

Often not, because they are measuring different things. A nutrition-led score and a processing-led score will disagree hardest on engineered products with good macros.