HOW TO Get a breakdown of your potential purchase

1 Sign up and in

To use Yuka you’ll need to sign up for a free account with your email (you can use Hide My Email if you like) and a password. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a quick intro to the app and then this button, ‘Scan my 1st product’.

2 Give it access

The Yuka app needs access to your iPhone or iPad camera in order to scan the barcodes, as those are where it gets its info from. The first time you use the app it’ll ask for permission; if you say no by accident you can change it in Settings.

3 Scan your shopping

All you need to do now is point your iPhone at the barcode. Make sure the code is the right way up; it wouldn’t scan upside-down ones when we tried. After a short pause, you’ll see the result at the bottom of the screen.

4 Feel good about food

With a score of 90 out of 100, these bagged fruits score well. Tap on the score and you’ll see a breakdown of the nutrition, but take it as a guide: Yuka tells us here that our tangerines, a naturally sugary fruit, don’t contain sugar.

5 Don’t check chocolate

There’s no getting away from the fact that sweet treats will generally score low. The average chocolate bar tends to be high in sugar and oil or fat content, with a high overall calorific value. It’s a similar story for fizzy drinks and crisps.

6 See what’s inside

With processed foods it’s often illuminating to see what’s involved in making them; the combination of a few additives and quite a bit of salt means that Yuka is giving these (very tasty) chicken gyozas a score of just 8/100.

7 Don’t panic

To Yuka’s credit it cites sources for all of its health claims, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right. For example, it classes MSG as hazardous, but the claims here refer to ‘may contribute/cause’, etc.

8 Check your cosmetics

Yuka doesn’t just do food. It can scan many common cosmetic items to let you know if they contain anything you might not want near your skin. Again there’s colour coding and percentage scores: our cleanser scores well.

9 Consider alternatives

As with food items, if Yuka thinks there are alternative options it’ll tell you about them here – in this example, it’s suggesting that instead of prepackaged cleansing wipes that we try a highscoring micellar cleansing water.