Bobby Approved and Fooducate: When the List Is One Man's Opinion and the Database Is Stale

At a glance

• Bobby Approved, from FlavCity creator Bobby Parrish, gives about 3,000 products a yes-or-no rating.
• Sodium is not among its ten flagged categories, and a product can be approved with 12 g of added sugar as long as the sugar is organic cane sugar.
• Reviewers who have tracked Fooducate since 2024 report outdated product data, with some barcodes returning old formulations.
• Fooducate gives GoGurt Strawberry a B-, despite 6 g of added sugar per tube.

The issue

Yuka is not the only model. Bobby Approved, from the FlavCity creator, is a binary list: approved or not, red or green. Fooducate assigns letter grades. Both promise certainty, and both have complaints piling up.

How big the problem is

Bobby Parrish is not a dietitian or nutritionist. Reviewers note that he calls ingredients "highly toxic" without evidence, that egg whites and certified organic gluten-free oats show up as not approved, that sodium is not among the ten flagged categories, and that a product can be approved with 12 g of added sugar as long as it is organic cane sugar. The database covers roughly 3,000 products, and App Store reviewers report the scanner hanging. Fooducate, according to reviewers who have tracked it since 2024, is declining: bugs, outdated product data with some barcodes returning old formulations, unresponsive support, and grades that hide sugar. GoGurt Strawberry earns a B-, which masks 6 g of added sugar per tube for a child.

What it means for you

An approved list is only as good as the last time someone updated it, and a letter grade needs a curve. Neither knows the label in your hand.

What EatSure does instead

EatSure does not depend on a product database to read a label. Photograph the ingredients and nutrition facts on the package in front of you, and deterministic rules, run on your phone, classify every ingredient against a knowledge base that people review and keep current. Barcode lookup is there for speed, receipt scanning is there for recalls, and when the app cannot confirm something, it says "could not verify" rather than approving it. For how the rules differ from a score, see 22 million Americans trust a food score.