Best Food Scanner Apps for 2027

For 2027, the food scanner app most worth making a habit is Open Food Facts. It costs nothing, needs no account, keeps your food data on your phone by its own account, and grades products with public standards: Nutri-Score for nutrition and NOVA for processing. Yuka, our 2026 winner, is a finalist for its polish and skin-care coverage, and EWG’s Healthy Living is the other finalist for homes that want cleaning products rated as well.

Scoring scanners for the long run

A scanner you use for a year sees every product you buy, so this edition read the five judging criteria with that in mind. Privacy and access were weighed against each app’s developer-reported App Store privacy section and its pricing model. Evidence asked whether the grade rests on a published public standard or on a company’s own formula. Novelty and everyday usefulness still counted, but a slick interface could not outweigh the others. Assessments are based on official app listings, the projects’ own documentation and established news coverage; nobody scanned shelves for this page.

Why the 2027 pick changed

Our 2026 award went to Yuka for turning grocery scanning into a mainstream habit, and nothing it did this year was a step backward. The change reflects what 2026 made clear: scanner apps disagree, sometimes sharply, because every app applies its own method. In NPR’s 2025 grocery-aisle comparison, an organic almond butter got 78 points from Yuka and a rejection from Bobby Approved over cane sugar. When apps diverge like that, the one built on openly documented standards, with data anyone can inspect and reuse, is the safest reference to keep for the long term.

Winner: Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is a volunteer-run nonprofit that maintains an open, crowd-built database of food products from around the world that anyone can use free of charge. The data carries the Open Database License: researchers, developers and other apps can reuse it as long as they credit the source and share their improvements. The project counts upward of 4 million products across 150 countries, entered by over 100,000 contributors.

Every scan shows three grades. Nutri-Score uses letters A through E for nutritional quality. NOVA’s four groups describe how heavily a food is processed. The Green-Score, formerly called the Eco-Score, rates environmental impact using data from the French environment agency ADEME. Because these are public systems rather than a company’s private blend, you can look up exactly what each grade means, and the project says France’s national nutrition and health program uses its database to validate its own nutrition scoring.

It is also the most privacy-respecting option here. On Apple’s store, the developer reports collecting nothing tied to your identity and nothing for tracking, lists no paid add-ons, and says the app can be used anonymously with food data that never leaves the phone. You can get it from Apple’s App Store, Google Play or F-Droid.

The trade-offs are honest ones. The interface is plainer than Yuka’s, and because volunteers enter much of the data, an odd-looking result is worth checking against the package. Missing products can be added by anyone in about a minute, which makes the database better for the next shopper. For a household that plans to scan for years, that openness is the real advantage: the grades follow public standards rather than a formula one company can quietly rewrite, and the underlying data will still be there, and still reusable, whatever happens to any single app built on top of it.

Finalist: Yuka

Yuka remains the most refined scanner and the right choice if you want one app for the kitchen and the bathroom cabinet. Its 100-point food score draws six-tenths from Nutri-Score-based nutrition, three-tenths from additives and the final tenth from organic certification, and any additive Yuka rates as high risk caps the product at 49. Its cosmetics scores flag ingredients it considers hormone disruptors, irritants or allergens. The App Store listing calls Yuka a fully independent project with no in-app advertising, and it reports no tracking data.

Premium buyers get offline scanning, search without a barcode, preference alerts and a full year of scan history. The reason it sits below the winner for 2027 is the additive weighting, which is Yuka’s own judgment and can swing a score sharply. NPR’s reporting carried a warning from CSPI dietitian Lindsay Moyer that additive flags in these apps can exaggerate the risk, and that shoppers should not empty their pantries over them.

Finalist: EWG’s Healthy Living

EWG’s app is the widest net on this list. Apple’s store page for it describes ratings for more than 200,000 cosmetics, foods and household cleaners on a ten-point scale where lower is better, and credits them to more than 30 years of research by the Environmental Working Group. Scanning is free, and paid Premium adds comparisons and ingredient preferences. Its main weakness for a long-term habit is privacy: the privacy section EWG completed names location and device identifiers among the data used for tracking.

Commended: Fig

Fig is the specialist for food allergies and elimination diets. You describe your household’s needs once, choosing needs like gluten free, low FODMAP, shellfish free or low histamine, and each barcode scan tells you whether a product fits. The free app handles scanning, and Fig+ adds restaurant guidance, multiple household profiles and unlimited scans. Fig’s App Store privacy section names location as tracking data.

Commended: ZOE

ZOE’s barcode scanner places packaged foods on what ZOE calls a Processed Food Risk Scale, from no risk to highest risk, alongside a 100-point score. It is free to download with paid Premium available and is useful as a second opinion next to NOVA. Its yardstick is proprietary to ZOE, and the app ties a long list of data to your identity, health data and coarse location among it.

Why Bobby Approved is not on the list

Bobby Approved, created by food influencer Bobby Parrish, awards a pass-or-fail stamp to products free of ten ingredient categories, from seed oils and refined sugars to natural flavors and GMOs, and says fewer than 10 percent of grocery products qualify. Parrish told NPR the app takes a clear position on clean, minimally processed ingredients. Its rules reflect one philosophy rather than a public nutrition standard, and a pass-or-fail stamp cannot weigh how much of an ingredient a product contains, the point Moyer made about a little sugar in nut butter, so it did not meet the evidence bar.

The 2027 scanners at a glance

App	Award	What the grade rests on	Cost	Tracking reported on App Store	Best use
Open Food Facts	Winner	Nutri-Score, NOVA, Green-Score	Free; nothing to buy in-app	None	Everyday food checks
Yuka	Finalist	Yuka formula built on Nutri-Score plus additive ratings	Free; paid Premium	None	Food and cosmetics
EWG’s Healthy Living	Finalist	EWG ratings	Free; paid Premium	Location and identifiers	Cleaners and toiletries
Fig	Commended	Your dietary profile	Free; paid Fig+	Location	Allergies and diets
ZOE	Commended	ZOE’s processed food research	Free; paid Premium	None	Processing focus

A scanner for every kind of shopper

1. You want the most trustworthy everyday reference: Open Food Facts.
2. Grocery and skin-care checks in a single app: Yuka.
3. You want your dish soap rated too: EWG’s Healthy Living.
4. Someone at home has a food allergy: Fig.
5. You are cutting back on ultra-processed food: check NOVA in Open Food Facts, then compare with ZOE.

For a broader rundown of the field, read our guide to Yuka alternatives.

Scanning smarter in 2027

The best scanner is the one whose grades you can understand and whose owner has no reason to monetize your shopping list. Open Food Facts meets both tests, which is why it takes the 2027 prize. Use any of these apps as a nudge rather than a verdict, and remember the simplest check of all: the ingredient list on the package is in order of quantity, so the first few items tell you most of the story.

<a href="https://innovationprizes.org/2027/best-food-scanner-apps/"><img src="https://innovationprizes.org/badges/2027-best-food-scanner-apps-winner.svg" alt="Innovation Prizes 2027 Winner: Food Scanner Apps" width="160" height="160"></a>

<a href="https://innovationprizes.org/2027/best-food-scanner-apps/"><img src="https://innovationprizes.org/badges/2027-best-food-scanner-apps-finalist.svg" alt="Innovation Prizes 2027 Finalist: Food Scanner Apps" width="160" height="160"></a>

<a href="https://innovationprizes.org/2027/best-food-scanner-apps/"><img src="https://innovationprizes.org/badges/2027-best-food-scanner-apps-finalist.svg" alt="Innovation Prizes 2027 Finalist: Food Scanner Apps" width="160" height="160"></a>