How Food App Yuka Is Changing What Shoppers Buy

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[00:00:29] Hey TNB-Listeners. Before we get started, heads up. We're going to be asking you a question at the top of each show for the next few weeks. Our goal here at Tech News Briefing is to keep you updated with the latest headlines and trends on all things tech. Now, we want to know more about you, what you like about the show, and what more you'd like to hear from us. We already asked you about some corners of tech you might be interested in. Now, we've got a few others in mind.

[00:00:58] Biotech, data science, robotics? Let us know what sparks your interest. If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description. Or you can send an email to tnb at wsj.com. Now, on to the show. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, May 8th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:01:24] Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a future in which your coworkers, therapists, and even friends will be AI. How realistic is that? Plus, a mobile app is leading food manufacturers to swap out ingredients in their products. We'll tell you about Yuka and how it decides what's healthy or not. Up first, Mark Zuckerberg has been talking non-stop about artificial intelligence.

[00:01:52] He's gone on podcasts, been interviewed, and made public appearances where he's basically gone all in on AI. He's painted a picture of a world in which AI agents will not only be a growing part of your workplace, but they'll become your friends and therapists, too. I think people are going to want a system that gets to know them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do. That was Zuckerberg speaking at a conference hosted by Stripe earlier this week.

[00:02:21] WSJ reporter Megan Bobrowski covers Meta and the social media industry. She's been following the story and joins me now. So Megan, we've seen AI agents become a bigger part of our work life, but friends and therapists? Why does Zuckerberg say that we'll have AI agents as our friends and therapists, too? He sees this world in which people have their real friends, but they also want someone who they can talk to throughout the day. And that's the therapist.

[00:02:49] There's people you can talk to about different things. Those are the friends. And then with business agents, if you want to buy something and you need to talk to someone about that business, he's talking about a world in which you would actually be interfacing with AI. I've been listening to a lot of interviews he's done over the past week or so, and a lot of them he's talking about how people do want real friends. He gave a stat that the average person has about three friends, give or take, but wants more connection, wants to have up to 15 friends.

[00:03:19] AI is one way to solve this, right? It's always going to respond to you. It's always available. Mark made it clear that it's not a replacement for friends, but he just kept talking about this idea that people want more connection and more friends. And most people are more lonely than they'd like to be. And so AI friends are one solution to that.

[00:03:41] Zuckerberg has had, as you put it in your story, mixed success when it comes to predicting how people are going to interact with each other in the future. Specifically, when he rebranded his company Meta after the Metaverse in 2021. Tell us about that and what it means for his AI vision. He invented Facebook, which went on to be a very lucrative company, acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. He does have an eye for this sort of thing with what's coming with the future.

[00:04:06] That being said, one of his more recent bets, the Metaverse, and people using virtual reality goggles to access virtual worlds, that bet has not been successful so far and is not something that's widely used. So his AI product is called Meta AI, and it's a chatbot that you can talk to, you can ask questions. And it's already in Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. And then it's also installed in the Meta Ray-Bans glasses, the hardware device.

[00:04:36] It's already integrated into all the products. Mark Zuckerberg at a conference said that nearly a billion people are using the AI service monthly already. What have people's reactions been to Zuckerberg's AI-forward future? A former Instagram executive I spoke with likened it to the arsonist setting a fire and then coming back to put the fire out. Basically saying that Instagram and Facebook are some of the reasons that we have social isolation to begin with. And so they're now proposing a solution.

[00:05:05] But in her mind, the solution was not actually a solution. But another person I talked to, a professor of psychology at UC Irvine, said that chatbots cannot fully replace friends or therapists. But he said there are instances where they may actually be useful. For instance, if you don't have a therapist, but you do need to talk to someone, a chatbot is not going to be as good as a therapist, but it's going to be better than nothing. That was WSJ reporter Megan Bobrowski.

[00:05:35] Coming up, an app that lets you publicly shame food companies over the ingredients in their products. We'll tell you about yucca, what's driving its growth and how food makers are responding after the break. Hey, wouldn't it be great if life came with remote control? You know, you could hit pause when you needed to or hit rewind. Like that time you knocked down that wasp's nest. Uh-oh.

[00:06:04] Well, life doesn't always give you time to change the outcome. But prediabetes does. With early diagnosis and a few healthy changes, you can stop prediabetes before it leads to type 2 diabetes. To learn your risk, take the one-minute test today at doihaveprediabetes.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and its prediabetes awareness partners. There's a mobile app that's changing what customers buy in grocery stores.

[00:06:33] Yucca lets you scan an item and then it gives the product a score based on its nutritional quality, additives used, and whether it's organic or not. The app and others like it have become so popular that it's caused food manufacturers to reformulate some of their products. But there are questions about how reliable the app's underlying data is. WSJ reporter Jessie Newman covers food and agriculture. She spoke with our colleague Victoria Craig about this.

[00:07:01] So for people like me who are unfamiliar with the Yucca app, just walk us through what it is. But more, how does it work? If I open it up, what can I do with it? So the way Yucca works is it's an app on your phone. The icon has a little like orange carrot that you tap to open it up. And it allows you to scan barcodes, both of food and cosmetics.

[00:07:24] You use your phone's camera to scan barcodes on any food product, and it will score that food from 1 to 100. And then based on that score that you get, it puts it into a category. The categories are bad, poor, good, and excellent. It renders this immediate judgment on whether the food is healthy or not. And if it receives a low score, it also gives you a recommendation for something that it deems to be healthier.

[00:07:52] And you have this great example of someone you spoke to in the story about how he used to use Hellman's mayonnaise, but as a result of using this app, he's now switched to using butter instead. So it has changed the way that people think about ingredients that are used in various foods. It's also changed the way, as you write, about how stores stock products. Yeah. So I should say this app not only gives you a rating, but it also tells you what it likes about the product and what it doesn't.

[00:08:20] And so it has lists of, like, positives, and it will tell you, okay, this product is low in calories or it's got fiber or it's low in sugar. And then it also gives you some of the negatives, and it will list the additives that are in the product. And it scores how risky it deems these additives to be. And you can then click on the individual additive and read more about the additive, what it's used for, what the science says. People we talked to said, nothing gets into my shopping cart before I use Yuka to scan it.

[00:08:47] And this app, it has tweaked over 1,000 of its products to remove more than 140 additives in order to boost scores on the app. Consumers are adopting it here in the U.S. more and more. And we also know that consumers love instant gratification, which this app also allows, because it's broken down this barrier between these large food companies and the consumers. Just in the app, they can send feedback straight to the companies themselves.

[00:09:14] What is that relationship like, and how have the companies responded? It's pretty interesting and unique. If there are additives that Yuka deems risky, the app offers this new feature as of last fall. It's called the call-out feature, and it allows you to either send a private email to the manufacturer or post it on social media saying, hey, I'm asking you to take these risky additives out of my food. And it's a pre-drafted message. You don't have to write anything.

[00:09:42] You can just send it immediately to the manufacturer. Manufacturers are responding to these messages. To a large degree, they're defending the use of these additives and saying, hey, they're FDA approved. They're safe. We also know that brands here in the U.S. are seriously considering reformulating their products in order to boost their scores and make their products healthier. Chobani, as an example, took this one additive that had been called out, dipotassium phosphate, out of its oat milk.

[00:10:09] Now, Chobani says it's been working on this for two years, so it's not necessarily a direct result. But these companies are getting thousands of messages via Yuka asking them to remove additives. This app is now a $7 million global business, and a third of Yuka's users are in the U.S. We have to mention this undercurrent in American society now that Robert Kennedy Jr. is head of the Health and Human Services Department. He has this Make America Healthy Again campaign.

[00:10:39] How is that playing into the success or the use of Yuka and other apps across the U.S.? So Yuka says they launched in 2017 in France, and they came to the U.S. in 2020. Things began to take off for them in 2020. There was a video that went viral on TikTok, and so U.S. consumers really started picking up the app then. And they say that Maha, the Make America Healthy Again movement, has really fueled the app even further,

[00:11:07] and that they've got a lot of users among people who would likely identify themselves as Maha supporters. And in fact, we learned that RFK Jr. himself is a user of Yuka. He said that HHS is looking to encourage other companies to develop similar apps. The adoption and the growing adoption of apps like Yuka is really being driven by the same fundamental distrust that we're seeing

[00:11:31] among consumers toward food ingredients of the companies that are making their food and regulators like FDA that are overseeing these companies. If distrust is pushing people to the platform, what is it about it that they feel like they can trust this platform with all of the advice that it's giving? They've got about 3 million products in their database, and so that's how they input the ingredients into the app.

[00:11:58] I talked to brands who said there's mistakes in what our ingredients are, or something like an ingredient stevia is listed twice, so we get docked points for stevia, and so that's obviously something that they need to address. And that question of which system, which proprietary algorithm are you going to trust to make decisions about what you eat and to make decisions about nutrition is definitely a question. That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with reporter Jesse Newman.

[00:12:26] And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Charlie Duffield with deputy editor Chris Zinsley. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.