Ivy Ranks #2 for Every Food-Scanner Keyword in the UK. In the US Chart, It Doesn't Exist.
Ivy: Processed Food Scanner is built by one developer, Ramzy Nanou, and does one thing: scan a barcode and it tells you how processed the product actually is — seed oils, additives, pesticides, microplastics — plus whether it fits diets like vegan or keto and any allergens you've flagged. It launched in 2024. Two years later it sits at 4.7 stars across 21K reviews, and in the UK App Store it's already outranking category veterans twice its age.
The app it's outranking almost everything except is Yuka — the French scanner that put "scan before you buy" on the map, now at 85 million users worldwide. Ivy is the clearest challenger in the space. But "clearest challenger" and "winning" are different things, and the keyword data shows exactly where the line sits.
Chart position: strong in one market, invisible in the rest
| Country | Health & Fitness chart (top-free) |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | #4 |
| Canada | #44 |
| United States | not in top 100 |
| France | not in top 100 |
France is Yuka's home turf, so Ivy being absent there isn't a surprise. The US is the harder number: Yuka itself sits at #5 in the US Health & Fitness chart, so the category clearly charts well there — Ivy just isn't part of that picture yet. Chart position matters less for a scanner app than for most categories, though, because almost nobody browses to "Health & Fitness" to find one. They type what the app does into search. That's where the real comparison lives.
Search visibility: #2 across the board in the UK
| Keyword | Ivy — UK | Yuka — UK | Ivy — US | Yuka — US |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| food scanner | #2 | #1 | #5 | #1 |
| ingredient scanner | #2 | #1 | #9 | #1 |
| food label scanner | #2 | #1 | #8 | #1 |
| processed food | #2 | #1 | #2 | #3 |
| clean eating | #3 | #1 | #17 | #1 |
| yuka | #4 | — | #17 | — |
In the UK, Ivy is indexed for every one of its core keywords and lands at #2 or #3 on five of six — a genuinely tight race against an app with four times its review count and eight years more history. The US tells a different story: the same app, the same feature set, drops to single- and low-double-digit ranks, and falls out of the chart entirely. Same product, two markets, two outcomes — which is the part worth noticing before assuming a UK win generalizes anywhere else.
The one keyword Ivy does win — and why it might not matter
There's one term where Ivy actually beats Yuka outright: "additive scanner," where Ivy sits at #1 in the UK against Yuka's #3. On paper, that's the headline win.
Google Trends on "additive scanner" in the UK tells a quieter story: the data is close to flat noise, with no meaningful search volume showing up over the past several years and no related or rising queries at all. Ranking #1 for a term almost nobody types is the exact "winning an empty room" pattern worth watching for — a real ranking, but not a real audience behind it yet.
The signal that actually looks encouraging
The more useful read comes from Trends on the broader category term, "food scanner app" — that one shows steady, real search interest in the UK, holding in the 12–26 range for months. Buried in the related-queries data for that term are two rising breakout searches: "yuka," up sharply, and "ivy app," up even further — both climbing as brand-name searches, not generic category terms.
That's a genuinely good sign for Ivy that the keyword-rank table alone doesn't show: people are starting to search for it by name, the same way they already search for Yuka by name. Brand recognition is building in the UK even in places where exact keyword rank still sits one spot behind the incumbent.
What this is worth checking if you're building into a category with an incumbent
- A tight #2 in your best market doesn't tell you what's happening elsewhere. Ivy's UK keyword coverage is close to excellent; the same app in the US chart doesn't exist. Check chart rank and search rank per country before treating one market's performance as the whole picture.
- Before celebrating a #1 ranking, check if anyone is searching that term at all. "Additive scanner" is a real win on paper and close to meaningless in Google Trends. A keyword worth defending is one with actual search volume behind it — verify before you optimize further around it.
- Watch brand-name search volume, not just category-keyword rank. "Ivy app" showing up as a rising query is a stronger long-term signal than any single keyword position — it means people are starting to look for the app specifically, which compounds in a way that a #2 category rank doesn't on its own.
- Being a close second to a much bigger incumbent is a genuinely strong result for a two-year-old app. The gap here isn't "invisible vs. visible" like most case studies in this series — it's "very good vs. dominant," which is a different, more achievable kind of gap to close.
Data pulled from live App Store chart, search, and Google Trends results via Pumf.it on August 27, 2026. This is a read of public App Store data, not a critique of Ivy as a product — a close #2 to an 85-million-user incumbent after two years is a strong result. The market-by-market gap and the low-volume keyword are both fixable with the same data shown here.