Your Category Is Being Scanned: What Yuka-Style FMCG Food and Drink Scanning Apps Mean for your Category and Shoppers

Yuka, Ivy, Open Food Facts, to name but a few of the food and drink scanning apps that are now making it easy for shoppers to scan a barcode and instantly check how healthy a product really is. You will also find them being promoted and used by social media influencers further raising the awareness and normalising this kind of quick health check in the aisle.

An app displaying information about food

How does this impact shoppers decision making?

The typical shopper journey of Awareness > Consideration > Evaluation > Purchase > Adoption now has a new disruptor. Apps provide more information at the evaluation stage. You can now ignore all the on pack cues, health messages and back of pack information. Simply pick up the pack, scan the barcode and in less than a second be given a colour coded rating from excellent to poor (on Yuka).

Anyone who reads back of pack and claims now has a speedier streamlined option. No doubt more people who took health cues and trusted products at face value are now gaining more information for the choices they are making in less than a second. It is also allowing shoppers to add health credentials, based on the apps ranking, as another layer in their decision making.

The growing health assessment and analysis by shoppers

We currently have low consumer confidence in the UK and cost of living remains a key concern for shoppers (Asda Income Tracker: six in 10 households feel worse off | The Grocer). Yet when making food choices health concerns remain high where the norm in a time of low consumer confidence and cost of living concerns usually leads to a drop in health being important. Despite this usual trend a high number of shoppers are still trying to eat healthily (Statista 60% of survey respondents attempted to eat healthily). Currently this is not the case with stores, social media awash with health content, messaging and products leaning into protein and natural trends.

Food and Drink in a Supermarket

Removal of confusion

The UPF trend has not gone away and continues to grow in both awareness and confusion (Is Joe Wicks’ Killer protein bar really ‘full of shit’? | Comment & Opinion | The Grocer). So an app that cuts through all of this, simply scans a product, assesses it for you and summarises that with one word is very appealing.

So what should commercial teams be doing?

• Understand the apps and data

Firstly do you have any of these apps? If not download one and start scanning your products and your competitors to see how your products score.

• Review trends in your category

Consider it any sales trends you are currently seeing align to the results you in the apps. Consider if you need to undertake consumer/shopper research to understand this further.  If you score positively this may be something you want to add into sales pitches.

• Develop for scanning

You might want to consider redevelopment of current SKUs and develop in future to score well in the apps.

• Watch out for Insight from the businesses collating the scanning data.

The app providers will be collecting a lot of insight and data of their own which they may start to publish. I would be looking out for the following

• Which categories are most scanned?

• Which shoppers and consumers are scanning the most? (I would put my money on parents over indexing)

• Are producers redeveloping products on the back of being scanned?

If you are looking for support to understand trends in your category and how to drive growth drop me a DM or email hello@curiouspuffin.com

#foodscanningapps #shopperjourney #categorymanagement