Olive scans food and cosmetics and flags ingredients you may be avoiding: seed oils, synthetic additives, allergens and the rest. It is well liked, with a 4.8 rating from about 40,000 ratings on the App Store at the time of writing, and it is the app that comes up most often alongside Yuka in comparisons.
Everything here comes from Olive’s own site and its App Store listing. Prices and features change, and in Olive’s case they appear to change depending on who is looking.
Is Olive free?
No, not in the way most scanners are. Olive runs on a subscription with a free trial, and the App Store listing describes a “7-day free trial” that asks for payment details up front. There is no open free tier of the kind Yuka has, and no unmetered scanning of the kind Kaibu has.
This is the single most common question about Olive, and the honest answer is that you will be asked to pay at the end of the trial or lose access.
What Olive costs
Olive does not publish one price. Its App Store listing shows several subscriptions at once: monthly options at $7.99 and $14.99, and annual ones at $29.99, $39.99, $49.99 and $69.99. That spread is what price testing looks like from the outside, so the figure you are offered may not be the figure somebody else is offered.
Worth knowing separately: the company behind Olive now also sells a medical weight-loss programme built around GLP-1 prescriptions, advertised from $199 a month, and that programme is what its home page leads with. The scanner is still its own app and still works. If you went looking for the scanner and found a drug programme, that is why.
Is Olive accurate?
It depends on which half you mean: whether it reads the label correctly, or whether you agree with what it flags.
Does it read the label correctly? Every scanner depends on the product record behind the barcode, and every scanner is occasionally wrong because the record is wrong, out of date, or for a different pack size. This is true of Olive, of Yuka and of Kaibu. Checking the packet is the only answer any of them can honestly give.
Do you agree with what it flags? This is the part people mean and it is not really accuracy. Olive flags categories such as seed oils and endocrine disruptors. Whether an ingredient belongs on that list is a judgement, and a contested one, rather than a fact the app gets right or wrong. Olive states that it takes no money to change a score, which is the relevant assurance.
Kaibu takes a narrower line here on purpose. It reports what the record says is in the product, gives the Nutri-Score grade the record carries, and matches the ingredients against the list you saved. It does not maintain its own opinion about which ingredients are objectionable, because that opinion is yours.
Where Kaibu differs
- Scanning is free and unmetered. No trial, no card, and no account needed. The free tier meters the personal verdict at five a week. It does not meter the scanning.
- The list is yours, not ours. Olive decides what counts as a concern. Kaibu matches against the diets and allergens you saved.
- Food only. Olive covers cosmetics too. Kaibu does not.
- The data is open. Kaibu reads Open Food Facts, and a product you add goes back for everyone.
- One price, published. Kaibu Premium is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, the same for everybody.
Which one suits you
If you want one app for food and cosmetics, and you want it to keep its own list of ingredients to avoid so you do not have to, Olive does that and a lot of people rate it highly.
If you would rather not pay to scan a barcode, and you want the answer to be about your own diet and allergens rather than a general list, that is what Kaibu does.
Neither app is a medical device, and neither replaces the packet. Label data can be wrong or out of date whoever holds it, so check the pack before you eat.