Credit where it is due
Yuka popularised food scanning. It put a scanner in millions of pockets and taught a generation of shoppers to turn the packet over before it goes in the trolley. Its database is large, the app is polished, and the core idea — point your phone at food, get a straight answer — changed how people shop. None of that is in dispute here.
If Yuka already does everything you need, keep using it. This page is for people who want processing level scored explicitly, personalisation without a subscription, or an app built for UK shelves first.
What each app chooses to score
Every food-scoring app is a set of editorial choices dressed up as a number. The honest comparison is not “which score is right” but “what did each app choose to count”.
Yuka's published approach is nutrition-led: a score built mainly on nutritional quality, with penalties for certain additives and a bonus for organic certification. That is a coherent design, and Yuka is open about it.
Cull makes a different choice. Every product is scored on three explicit factors: nutritional quality, additive safety, and processing level under the NOVA classification. The third factor is the real difference between the two apps. Yuka's score does not include how processed a product is. Cull's does — and our UPF scanner flags the NOVA group on every scan.
Why score processing at all? UK adults get roughly 50 to 57 per cent of their daily energy from ultra-processed food, among the highest shares in Europe. A 2024 umbrella review in The BMJ, covering around 9.9 million participants, found higher UPF exposure consistently associated with 32 adverse health outcomes. Those are associations, not proof of cause — and NOVA itself has real limits: in a 2022 study, over 150 expert coders classifying the same foods reached only fair agreement (Fleiss kappa of about 0.32 to 0.34). Ultra-processed and unhealthy are correlated, not synonymous. A fortified wholemeal loaf is not a cola, even if both are NOVA 4.
That is exactly why Cull shows processing as its own factor rather than burying it in a single number. On every scan you see the full breakdown — what came from nutrition, what came from additives, what came from processing. We do not hide behind a proprietary algorithm and ask you to trust us.