Does your product score well on nutritional apps?
1st February 2021
Finnian O'Luasa, Manager France & Belgium, Bord Bia - The Irish Food Board
As described in a recent food alert, nutritional apps have been launched in France to help consumers make healthy choices for food shopping. Since the Covid pandemic, the nutritional factor has become even more important than ever as evidenced in Bord Bia’s Covid 19 future proofing tookit which demonstrates a strong trend towards nutritional choices in order to protect health.
The market leader, Yuka , with now over 20 million users in 11 countries, not only gives an overall score out of 100 on the nutritional value of the product but also lists harmful additives and proposes alternative cleaner label products.
A new generation of nutritional apps developed in France recently help consumers make more personalised choices. Carrefour have launched a personalised app in partnership with the start up Innit . The consumer fills in a questionnaire detailing preferences and habits, the app then scores products accordingly. 40 000 products may be scanned by the app with nutritional information that matches the users profile.
Siga Care is another app launched recently that scores products according to their level of processing, with highly processed products scoring poorly and the best of the lesser processed products being awarded a gold medal.
The nutritional apps can be seen as a virtual extension of the Nutri-Score label visible on many consumer food products. Implemented for the first time in France in 2017, the Nutri score logo is based on the work of French public health authorities. Since its launch in France, several countries have decided to recommend its use: Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Nutri score is used by over 350 companies and brands on a voluntary basis.
These trends underline the importance of using healthy ingredients in NPD and making sure that if scanned the products achieves a high nutritional score to maintain a competitive advantage. This is important for brands but also private label as retailers become ever more aware of these new decision drivers resulting from nutritional apps.
References :
https://www.bordbia.ie/industry/covid-19/future-proofing/
https://www.digitalfoodlab.com/foodtech-brands-2020/
https://www.lineaires.com/la-distribution/score-nutritionnel-carrefour.fr-lance-l-innit-personnalise