Yuka for Kids? Why One Score Can't Fit a Toddler and a Teen

Yuka has more than 85 million users, 28 million of them in the US, for a good reason. You point it at a barcode and in a second you know whether the cereal in your hand is a 30 or an 80. If you are a parent, the next question comes just as fast: does that number mean the same thing for a three-year-old? We built Sito to answer that question, so we sat down with Yuka's published method and our own and worked through the same products in both.

What Yuka Does, and Does Well

Yuka is a French app that scans the barcode of a packaged food or a cosmetic and returns a score out of 100 with a colour: excellent, good, poor or bad. It launched in France in 2017, and the United States is now its largest market.

Three things about it deserve credit. The scan is fast and the database is enormous. The verdict is blunt in a way that most nutrition advice is not, which is exactly why people trust it. And the company has stayed independent: Yuka states that brands cannot pay for a score, it takes no advertising or affiliate money, and it is funded by user subscriptions. When French charcuterie producers sued over its nitrite warnings, Yuka won on appeal. That is a company that means what it says.

So none of what follows is about Yuka's honesty. It is about what its score is built to measure.

The One Thing to Know: One Score for Everyone

Open Yuka's own explanation of how food is scored and read it looking for one word: age. It is not there. Yuka has no child profile, no age input, and no version of the score for a smaller eater. A granola bar gets the same score for a 35-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 2-year-old.

That matters because the nutrition part of Yuka's score is Nutri-Score, the front-of-pack label used across much of Europe. Nutri-Score is a good tool for what it was built for: ranking packaged foods against each other for the general population. But it works per 100 grams, with fixed thresholds, and it was never designed around a child's limits.

A child's limits are not smaller by a little. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans say children under 2 should have no added sugar at all. After that, added sugar should stay under 10% of daily calories, which for a preschooler is roughly 25 to 35 grams a day, against 50 grams on an adult label. The sodium ceiling the National Academies set for a 1-to-3-year-old is 1,200 mg, about half of an adult's. The "20% of daily value" printed on a box is an adult number. For a four-year-old it is closer to 40%.

A score that ignores all of that is not wrong. It is just an adult score.

How Yuka's Score Is Built

Yuka publishes its weights, and we are going to use them exactly as written, because the interesting differences come straight out of them.

• Nutrition, 60%. Nutri-Score, converted to points out of 100. One hard rule sits on top: a product with a Nutri-Score of D or E cannot score above 49, whatever else is true about it.
• Additives, 30%. Each additive is one of four colours: risk-free, limited, moderate or high. A single high-risk additive caps the whole product at 49.
• Organic, 10%. A product with an official organic label gets a flat bonus worth a tenth of the scale.

For comparison, our method is 50 points nutrition, 33 points additives, 17 points processing, plus an organic bonus of 4. On top of that base sits a per-child layer, computed on your phone, that we will get to in a moment. Both methods are deterministic and both are published. The whole difference is in what they are for.

Six Products, Three Ages

We picked six products US parents actually scan, all from our own database, scanned each one in the Yuka app on 3 and 4 September 2026, and put Yuka's number next to what Sito shows for a 1-year-old, a 4-year-old and a 10-year-old. Sito's numbers are the live ones in the app. Each row is here to show one thing, and the last column of the table says what.

Yuka numbers are from the Yuka app, scanned on 3 and 4 September 2026. Sito numbers are live in the app; "younger child" is the score a child under 2 or under 6 sees where it differs, as explained under each product.

Look at what moved and what did not. The Froot Loops agree on the verdict and split on the number, by 17 points, depending on who is eating. The teething wafer is the one to remember: "excellent" on Yuka, "once in a while" for the child it is sold to, on the strength of a 90% fruit-and-vegetable figure that the ingredient list does not support. Cheerios next to Froot Loops shows what a single additive is allowed to do to a score. The juice box shows what a perfect 100 hides. And the purée shows the two methods agreeing when the label is simple: plain fruit scores at the top in both.

None of these are edge cases. They are the first six things we thought of.

The Organic Bonus: 10 Points or 4

Yuka gives 10% of its scale to an organic label. Its reasoning is that organic farming avoids synthetic pesticides, which is true. But the bonus is the same 10 points for a bag of organic gummies as for a bag of organic spinach, and it has drawn criticism from dietitians for exactly that reason. Every organic product in our table got it, teething wafer and juice box included, and on a mid-grade product 10 points is enough to change the colour.

We give 4. The number was chosen to be smaller than our narrowest band, so a certification can break a tie or nudge a product on a boundary, but it can never carry a product past a whole band. Organic sugar is still sugar. We would rather a parent see that the teething wafer is "sometimes" and the organic label is a small plus than see an "excellent" that the label helped buy.

Additives: Four Colours or 253 Rows

Yuka classifies each additive into one of four colours and explains the criteria in general terms. The per-additive verdicts live in the app. Ours live on a web page you can read without installing anything: 253 additives, each with its class, whether it carries a child flag, and the EFSA, FDA, IARC or OEHHA citation behind it.

The child flag is the part Yuka has no equivalent for. Take the colourings in Froot Loops. Both apps mark them. But EFSA's own exposure assessments find that children can exceed the acceptable daily intake for several of them, so in Sito each one moves up a class for a child under 6, and the card says so: that is the 21 becoming a 4. The phosphate in Honey Nut Cheerios carries the same flag, on EFSA's phosphate assessment, but it already sits in our highest class, so there is nowhere further for it to go. Seventy-six of our 253 rows carry a flag like that, each with the assessment cited. For most products the flag changes nothing, because a product with four colourings is usually already at the floor of that axis. On the 200 kids' products we tested, it touched about one in ten.

The other difference is what a single additive is allowed to do to the whole score. Yuka caps any product with one high-risk additive at 49, so plain Cheerios lands at 30, "poor", a dozen points above Froot Loops, on the strength of a fortification phosphate. Our additive axis is a third of the score, not a ceiling on it, and we mark that same phosphate high. The oats still count, and Cheerios ends up 34 points from Froot Loops instead of 12.

Do Companies Pay Yuka for Higher Ratings?

You will find this claim on social media, and we want to be clear that we found nothing behind it. Yuka's independence page says brands cannot pay for scores and that requests from manufacturers are declined. Its revenue is subscriptions. It has been to court against food-industry groups and won. If you see a product scored higher than you expected, the explanation is in the method above, most often the organic bonus or the way Nutri-Score treats a category, not in anyone's wallet.

Which One Should a Parent Use?

Use Yuka if you want a fast, independent read on a product for yourself, or a second opinion on a cosmetic. It is very good at that, and its additive warnings have pushed real reformulations.

Use Sito if the person eating it is your child. The scan is the same. The difference is that the score is worked out for your child's age, the sentence under it names your child's daily limit, and the same scan logs the food into their day so you can see what the week adds up to. Sito also does the things Yuka does not try to do: photo logging, five ways to log a meal, and nutrient targets for iron, calcium, fiber and vitamin D. We compare the whole category in our roundup of kids' nutrition apps.

Plenty of parents will use both. That is fine with us.

Is There a Yuka for Kids?

No, and that gap is the reason Sito exists. Yuka has one method and it gives every product one score for everyone. There is no age input and no child profile, and the nutrition half of the score is Nutri-Score, which was built for the general adult population. Sito does for a child what Yuka does for an adult: the same barcode scan, a score out of 100 worked out for your own child's age, your child's own daily limit written under it, and a published method you can check. There is no Yuka for kids. There is Sito.