Nutri-Score, Yuka, NutrInform Battery and Eco-Score do not measure the same thing and do not even belong to the same category. Nutri-Score is a front-of-pack nutrition system supported by a published research literature. Yuka combines a nutrition score with its own treatment of additives and an organic bonus, producing a proprietary overall rating. NutrInform Battery presents information about a serving rather than a single judgment. Eco-Score is about environmental impact, not nutrition. None of them is an oracle.

It happens in the supermarket, usually somewhere between the biscuits and the ready-made sauces. Someone takes out a phone, scans the barcode on a pack of crackers and receives a verdict in two seconds: green badge, good. Or red badge, bad. The package goes back onto the shelf with the satisfaction of having avoided a threat.

That quick, instinctive, apparently rational gesture contains a major misunderstanding. The problem is not necessarily the app. It is what we imagine the app is doing for us.

There are several systems designed to help people choose food, and the first thing to understand is that they are not interchangeable. They do not use the same data, they do not work in the same way, and they do not answer the same question. Yet in the minds of many consumers they become the same thing: colored signals telling you whether a food is good or bad.

That is the first mistake.

Nutri-Score is a front-of-pack nutrition label developed in France and adopted voluntarily in a number of European countries. It uses five letters, A to E, paired with colors from dark green to red. Its algorithm is public, which means the scoring logic can be inspected and debated. It also has a substantial published scientific literature assessing how the score relates to nutritional quality, consumer understanding and health outcomes in large populations.

That does not make Nutri-Score perfect.

The system standardizes foods largely per 100 grams or 100 milliliters, which is useful for comparing similar products but does not always reflect the portion a person actually eats. One hundred grams of olive oil, for example, is not an ordinary serving. The algorithm has been updated over time and treats oils differently from earlier versions, but the basic limitation remains: a standardized reference amount is useful for comparison, not for declaring an absolute judgment on a food. Nutri-Score also does not directly measure how processed a food is, and it cannot represent every micronutrient or every aspect of food quality.

Then there is Yuka. Yuka is not a public nutrition label. It is a commercial app developed by a private French company. Scan a barcode and it gives you a score from 0 to 100 with a color.

The score combines different dimensions. A large share comes from nutritional quality using logic derived from Nutri-Score. Another share concerns additives, which Yuka classifies into risk categories based on its own methodology. A further component rewards organic certification. The result feels like a single scientific verdict, but it is actually a composite score built from choices about how different dimensions should be weighted.

The additive component is where the conceptual problem becomes easiest to see. Toxicology depends heavily on dose. The presence of a substance alone is not the same thing as exposure at a harmful dose. An app that reduces an additive to a “risk” category cannot know how much of that additive you will consume across your diet, how often you consume the product or whether the exposure approaches a health-based guidance value.

Let us take a concrete example, because this point deserves to be understood properly. Coca-Cola Zero Zero — zero sugar, zero caffeine — is one of the drinks most criticized by people who have turned fear of additives into an identity. “It contains additives, so at that point regular Coca-Cola is better” is a sentence repeated with almost religious certainty. If you challenge it, the answer is almost always the same: “Read the studies.” As though the person saying it had actually read them.

So let us read them.

The three sweeteners in Coca-Cola Zero Zero are aspartame, acesulfame K and sodium cyclamate. For each of them, EFSA — the European Food Safety Authority, not a blogger or an Instagram reel — has established an acceptable daily intake. This is the maximum amount a person can consume every day for a lifetime without health risk. And that threshold already includes a large safety margin: it is typically set one hundred times below the dose at which no adverse effect was observed in studies. One hundred times.

For aspartame, the threshold is 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. A 330 ml can contains about 180 milligrams. That means a 70-kilogram person would have to drink between 12 and 15 cans a day, every day, for a lifetime, to reach — not exceed, reach — the safety limit. For sodium cyclamate, the calculation comes to about 13 cans. For acesulfame K, about 8.

Eight cans a day. Every day. For a lifetime. And even then you would still be within the safety margin, not outside it.

Now, anyone who drinks eight cans of anything a day has a problem, but that problem is not called aspartame. It is called common sense. Someone who drinks one can with lunch, or uses it as a pressure valve to avoid a heavier indulgence, is doing exactly what the science says can be done: consuming a safe product in the normal quantities in which it is used. Yet Yuka shows an orange or red badge for that can. Because its algorithm does not know — structurally cannot know — how much of that additive you are consuming. It only knows that it is there, and infers risk from its presence. It is like walking into a hospital and saying it is dangerous because there are scalpels.

Yuka also gives a bonus to organic products. Organic certification tells you something real about how a product was produced; it does not automatically establish superior nutritional quality. Folding that production choice into one nutrition-like score is therefore an editorial decision by the app, not a universal scientific rule.

The important distinction is this: pieces of Yuka's methodology may rely on external evidence, but the final weighting of those pieces into one proprietary score is the company's model. A large user base does not itself validate the composite algorithm as a health-outcome measure.

NutrInform Battery is the Italian system promoted by public institutions. Unlike Nutri-Score, it does not give one synthetic grade. It shows battery-like icons representing the contribution of a stated serving to daily reference intakes for energy, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt. The idea is to provide numbers and leave the judgment to you.

The advantage is clear: it can communicate the quantity in the serving you actually eat rather than a standardized 100-gram amount. The disadvantage is equally clear: you need to understand the numbers and put them in the context of the rest of your day. Research on front-of-pack labels shows an interesting tension: people may say they prefer more detailed systems while simpler interpretive labels can sometimes perform better in tasks that ask people to rank products by nutritional quality.

There is also politics and industry around the debate. Italy has defended NutrInform in part because standardized scoring systems can penalize foods such as cheese, cured meat and olive oil when considered per 100 grams. France has strongly promoted Nutri-Score as a public-health tool. Research traditions, national policy and food industries all interact here. Nobody should pretend the controversy is happening in a vacuum.

Eco-Score, finally, measures something different: environmental impact. It is designed to summarize factors such as greenhouse-gas emissions, land use, water use, packaging and transport. It does not tell you whether a food is nutritionally healthy. That distinction matters.

Different systems, different logics, different dimensions. None is an oracle.

And that is where the discussion changes direction. The real issue is not which badge is “best.” It is delegation — the idea that a color, a score from 0 to 100 or a letter from A to E can replace judgment. Your judgment.

These tools are useful for what they are: partial lenses. Nutri-Score can help compare broadly similar products. Yuka can draw your attention to ingredients or additives you may want to investigate. NutrInform can show how a serving contributes to daily reference values. Eco-Score can add an environmental dimension. None of them can tell you whether this product makes sense for your meal today, your week or your personal needs.

That answer still requires context.

If you understand the broad balance between what you eat and what you expend, if you try to build meals with carbohydrates, protein, fat and plant foods without obsession, and if you understand that an indulgence is a normal part of eating rather than a moral failure, you already have something more valuable than a badge. Most of the time you eat with a basic criterion; some of the time you enjoy pizza, dessert or ice cream with your child. That is not the enemy. That is life.

An app cannot give you that. A label cannot replace knowing what you are doing. Once you do know, the badge becomes what it should have been all along: one more tool, not the boss.