Bagged and Yuka
Scans one product's barcode and rates it. Bagged reads the whole receipt.
Yuka is a barcode scanner. You point a phone at a single product, it looks the item up and returns a rating for it, along with alternatives. It covers food and cosmetics and it works in the shop, in front of the shelf.
Bagged works at the other end of the trip. You photograph the receipt once, after the shopping is done, and it reports on the whole basket at once.
That single difference in where the tool sits produces almost every other difference between them.
The short answer
Different jobs. Yuka is a shelf-side tool for judging one product with real ingredients data. Bagged is a weekly measurement of an entire basket, including everything you would never have scanned. Using both is coherent.
Side by side
| Feature | Yuka | Bagged |
|---|---|---|
| What it reads | One product barcode at a time. | Every line on a till receipt, in one photograph. |
| When you use it | In the aisle, before buying. | After the shop, once a week. |
| Coverage of a shop | The items you remember to scan. | The whole basket. On the example receipt, all 16 lines. |
| Unpackaged items | Not covered, since there is no barcode. | Covered, because loose items still print on the receipt. |
| Source of the judgement | The product's ingredients and nutrition data. | The product name as printed, which carries no ingredients list. |
| Money | Not covered. | Line-item spend. £32.29 of food and drink on the example receipt. |
| Output | A rating per product. | A proportion of the basket, and the lines that produced it. No score or grade. |
What Yuka does well
- It works at the point of decision, in the aisle, before the product is in the trolley.
- It reads the actual barcode, so it can use the real ingredients list and nutritional panel rather than inferring anything from a name.
- It suggests specific alternative products.
- It covers cosmetics as well as food, which is outside Bagged entirely.
What it does not cover
- It sees the products you chose to scan, which is a self-selected sample of your shopping.
- Loose produce, unpackaged items, bakery goods and anything without a barcode cannot be scanned.
- It has no view of what you spent, so it cannot connect what you bought to what it cost.
- Scanning every item in a weekly shop is not a realistic weekly ritual.
The sampling problem
The deepest difference is not coverage, it is selection. Anything you have to remember to use records the things you chose to record. Nobody scans the biscuits on the way past, and the items least likely to be scanned are exactly the ones that would move the figure.
A receipt is produced regardless. It is not a sample of the shop, it is the shop, and it exists whether or not you were paying attention that week.
Ratings and proportions are different outputs
Yuka answers what about this product. Bagged answers what about this shop. A rating is a judgement on an item, while a proportion is a description of a basket, and the second is what changes when a household changes.
Bagged also refuses to grade. It reports that £11.30 of the food and drink was ultra-processed and shows the lines behind it. There is no number out of one hundred, no colour verdict and no comparison against other shoppers. More on why in what is ultra-processed food.
Common questions
- Is Bagged an alternative to Yuka?
- Not really. Yuka judges a single product from its barcode before you buy it. Bagged measures a whole shop from the receipt after you have bought it. They answer different questions and neither replaces the other.
- Does Bagged scan barcodes?
- No. Bagged reads the receipt instead, which is deliberate: it covers the entire basket including loose produce and bakery items, and it needs one photograph a week rather than an action per product.
- Which is more accurate?
- They work from different sources. A barcode scan can read the real ingredients list, which a receipt does not carry, so a per-product judgement from a barcode has better information. Bagged trades some of that per-item certainty for complete coverage of the basket, and records how confident each classification is.
- Does Bagged give a score out of 100?
- No. Bagged reports proportions and amounts, never a score, grade or target. That is a deliberate product decision rather than a missing feature.
See it on your own receipt.
One photo of your shopping receipt shows what share of it was ultra-processed, and where the money went, line by line.
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