One Score for Everyone Is a Score for No One: The Personalization Gap in Food Apps
By the EatSure teamPublished 2 min read
On this page
At a glance
- A granola bar with 8 g of added sugar can score in the 70s, because the thresholds are calibrated for adults. For a child, that is about a third of the daily limit.
- Yuka has no kids mode, and Bobby Approved has no kids ratings.
- Searching Yuka by product name requires Premium, on a sliding scale that tops out around 20 dollars a year.
- EatSure starts from your profile: allergens, diet rules, goals, values, and who you are shopping for.
The issue
A granola bar with 8 g of added sugar can score in the 70s because sugar is one input among many and the thresholds are calibrated for adults. For a child, that 8 g is about a third of the daily limit. Yuka has no kids mode. Bobby Approved has no kids ratings. And the personalization that does exist sits behind a paywall: searching Yuka by name requires Premium, on a sliding scale that tops out around 20 dollars a year.
How big the problem is
22 million US users, one scoring curve. None of the major scanners hold your allergens as a hard rule, distinguish a heart patient from a teenager, or know that you are shopping for a toddler and a 70-year-old parent in the same cart. We compared the alternatives in Bobby Approved and Fooducate.
What it means for you
The right question is not "is this food good" but "is this food good for the person eating it".
What EatSure does instead
EatSure starts with you. Your food profile holds allergens (the big nine, custom entries, and alpha-gal), diet rules (vegan, vegetarian, halal, kosher), goals like heart health, blood pressure, and kidney, the values you look for, and the ingredients you avoid at three levels. Body stats are optional and unlock your personal share of a nutrient next to the label's own figure. Setup asks two questions, who you are shopping for (young children, older adults 65 and over) and how careful you want to be (Selective or Strict), and the app escalates flags accordingly: "We flag that when you're shopping for kids." Free to start, recall alerts included. How each of those turns into a verdict is written down in How EatSure grades food.
