Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, professor of consumer behaviour and marketing at Aarhus University in Denmark, has some reassuring words for manufacturers grappling with how to address the clean label trend. While interest in products made with familiar ingredients is sometimes presented as new, she argues it is something with which companies will, in fact, already be familiar.
“In the time I have been working in this area, research has always shown that consumers want food to be natural,” says Aschemann-Witzel. “At some point, ‘clean label’ came up, but before it was organic or non-GMO. It’s different versions of the same trend. I think it’s simply another version of the same thing that we have been seeing in past decades.”
Indeed, while clean label is an increasingly familiar term, it is significant there is no one definition of what makes for such a product. “Their main characteristics include only using ingredients consumers recognise, using only a few ingredients and avoiding the use of GMO or additives,” says Yuri Terakado, food and drink research analyst at Mintel.
Mintel, which is a market research firm, has conducted surveys that attempt to quantify consumer interest in such products. According to Terakado, they show that for a portion of shoppers this is an important concern.
“In Brazil, 39% of consumers are interested in purchasing products with a clean label and would be willing to pay more [for such good],” she says. “In the US, 46% of consumers avoid products with artificial colourings, and 34% think natural claims are important when choosing food and drinks.”
Perhaps little wonder, then, that there are attention-grabbing predictions about the potential value of the clean label ingredients market. Future Market Insights, another research firm, projects the market’s value will grow by 15.5% in the next ten years, reaching $212.4bn by 2035.
Guided tour
Also growing is the external guidance that is available to consumers who wish to prioritise clean label. Traditionally, a shopper had to rely on their own judgement of the information provided by a manufacturer. But now it’s possible to gain detailed independent assessment at the tap of a phone screen.
Julie Chapon is co-founder of product scanning app Yuka and argues its success – founded in 2017 in France, it now has 70 million users globally – is driven in part by “distrust towards the food industry”.
“At the time we founded Yuka, there was a huge scandal in France with horse meat in lasagne. We also had fipronil contamination of eggs. And in many countries, there have been a lot of product recalls.
“Where previous generations blindly trusted what they were buying, the new generations have started to question what was actually in the products,” she says.
Users of Yuka scan a product and then receive an instant breakdown of its ingredients and nutritional value. “We arrived to answer a need for more transparency because as these scandals were fuelling distrust, people started to try to decipher the labels and realised it was very complicated. You have all these complicated names, and you have nutritional values that it can be hard to make sense of.”
The company is independent. Its scientific team creates the analysis users see when they scan a product, and its funding comes solely from users who opt for the premium version of the app. The idea is that there is no way for manufacturers to game the situation – the only way to get a good rating is to create products that are judged ‘clean’ by its team of scientists and healthcare professionals.
Clean label ingredients market Country growth CAGR from 2025 to 2035
“I think a lot of manufacturers understand that consumers want healthier products, so they adapt and make those products,” says Chapon. “That is good for consumers, and it is good for business. I think the ones who will lose business are those that don’t want to change anything, and the ones that stick to their bad products with bad ingredients thinking this is just a trend that will disappear. But I don’t think it’s a temporary trend.”
Next bold steps
Asked about the long-term plans for her own business, Chapon talks notably of a two-pronged mission. One aspect is the immediately obvious: to continue to support consumers in making choices on food (and on cosmetics, which are also rated by the app). But the second is perhaps more significant for manufacturers. “By being more aware [about] what is in products and by changing their purchasing habits, consumers can push manufacturers to improve what’s in their products,” she says. “So that is the second level of our mission – to push manufacturers to improve their products.”
Key figures for the Yuka app
The intention is that the push will be a public one, not least through a ‘call out’ feature. If a user scans a food product that includes what Yuka judges to be a high-risk additive, the app makes it easy to contact the manufacturer in question.
“You can directly email the brand through the app. Everything is pre-filled, but there is also an option to modify the message. Or you can call out the brand publicly on social media – you can publish a tweet on X, or call it out on LinkedIn or Instagram through a comment on its latest post.”
“You can directly email the brand through the app. Or you can call out the brand publicly on social media.” – Julie Chapon
In less than a year, more than 600,000 such callouts have been made. Yuka already has a history of encouraging companies to make changes. In 2019, the French supermarket chain Intermarché announced it was reformulating 900 products by removing 142 additives. The express aim was to achieve better ratings on the app.
It illustrates that, for some consumers, clean label is sufficiently important that it is a key driver of purchasing decisions. “Consumers are more conscientious about reading product labels,” Terakado suggests. “They are increasingly choosing additive-free, natural, clean label options. There is the desire to know exactly what is going into a product, including where the product is produced and by whom.”
Nonetheless, Aschemann-Witzel – who alongside her professorial role at Aarhus University is director of its MAPP Centre, which researches value creation in the food sector for consumers, industry and for society – stresses that the factors influencing consumer food choice are complex. “It depends on the consumer, the product and the context,” she says.
In other words, not every customer is going to prioritise clean label. Even those who do make decisions based on clean label may not prioritise it to the same extent in every situation. If a product is highly processed but tastes good and is well priced, it may well remain popular despite a general interest in ‘natural’ food.
In communicating with consumers, AschemannWitzel suggests manufacturers will need to consider the situations in which shoppers will make judgements. “One can maybe think of the different processing modes that consumers have in different situations. Sometimes we are more subconsciously processing – if we have little time in the supermarket, we react to the packaging [and the main phrases on it]. But if we sit at home eating breakfast, maybe we read the back of the milk package, the granola package, or we read something in the newspaper [about foods]; it’s more conscious.”
Catering to this subconscious processing is likely to mean using clean label wordings, framing a product as natural, “or simply having a product that is so good people buy it despite it being processed”. Where a consumer is spending more time reading and researching, however, Yuka’s Chapon argues clean-label-style wording is unlikely to be enough. “I think we can see there is a global need from consumers to be more informed and buy better products,” she says. “We started in Europe, but now we are seeing the same in the US with the Make America Healthy Movement.
“A lot of the growth of the app is that people were discovering things about products they’ve always thought were good because of the marketing – the packaging looked nice, you had claims like ‘natural’ or ‘handmade’. But people started to realise that beyond this marketing there were things that they didn’t think were in the products [that were].”
The bigger picture
Those using the app “are not just scanning for themselves to be in better health, or their families to be in better health”, she argues. “They have the feeling of being part of something bigger – they are participating in something bigger in pushing manufacturers to improve what’s in that product. When they stop buying something, they know they have an impact.”
She points out the central job of food manufacturers is to respond to a demand. “If the demand changes towards healthier products, it’s in their interest to adapt and make healthier products. I think this is not a good thing or a bad thing for manufacturers, but an opportunity for them.”
