Olive app review: what it costs, what it does well, and the complaints

Olive has a 4.8 on the App Store and a 3.7 on Google Play. Here's what the seed-oil food scanner does, what it really costs, and how it compares to Yuka.

Maddox Schmidlkofer

October 1, 2026

Searches for "Olive app review" have been climbing all year, and it's easy to see why. Olive went from launch in January 2025 to more than 40,000 App Store ratings, and it's pitched as the Yuka alternative for people who care about seed oils.

It's also an app with a 4.8 on the App Store and a 3.7 on Google Play, and that gap is worth understanding before you hand over a card for the free trial.

Here's what Olive is, what it actually costs, what it does better than Yuka, and the complaints that keep coming up.

(Disclosure: I build Tallow, which competes with Olive. I haven't paid for an Olive subscription. This review is based on Olive's App Store and Google Play listings, its own website and blog, and public user reviews, all as of October 1, 2026. Where something is Olive's own claim, I say so.)

What is the Olive app?

Olive (listed as "Olive: Food & Cosmetic Scanner," made by Giga Studios, Inc. in San Francisco) is a barcode scanner for food, cosmetics, skincare and personal care products. You scan a product and get a 0–100 score with flagged ingredients and suggested alternatives.

According to its App Store listing, it:

• Covers over 1 million products across food and personal care
• Flags seed oils, synthetic additives, "toxins" and endocrine disruptors
• Includes lab-tested data for heavy metals, PFAS and microplastics
• Has a seed-oil-free restaurant finder
• Adds an AI "health companion" and daily symptom tracking

It has also grown well beyond a scanner. Olive's website now describes a habit-coaching program and physician-prescribed peptides, offered through licensed clinicians if one "decides they're right for you." Its medical board includes Dr. Chris Knobbe, the ophthalmologist best known for his work arguing that seed oils drive chronic disease.

How much does Olive cost?

There's no meaningful free tier. Olive is a subscription with a free trial, and its App Store listing shows:

The ranges reflect different offers and introductory prices. For comparison, Yuka's scanner is free (Premium is ~$10–20 a year), Bobby Approved is free, Oasis Pro starts at $47 a year, and Tallow's scanning is free with Premium at $9.99 a month or $29.99–$39.99 a year.

What Olive does well

Seed oils are front and center. This is the biggest difference from Yuka. Yuka's score is based on Nutri-Score, which doesn't distinguish canola oil from olive oil. In our side-by-side test, Yuka never mentioned the soybean oil in Sabra hummus. Olive is built around flagging exactly that.

It covers cosmetics and personal care properly. Food, skincare, makeup and household products all go through the same scanner, which is useful if you're cleaning out a bathroom cabinet as well as a pantry.

It does some of its own lab testing. Olive says it has run its own heavy-metal tests (lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic) on roughly 400 products. Paying for testing is expensive, and that's more than most scanner apps do. (Its blog post doesn't name the lab.)

It handles restaurants too. Having a seed-oil-free restaurant finder in the same app as the grocery scanner saves you a second subscription.

The complaints to know about

The 4.8 vs 3.7 gap

On the App Store, Olive has a 4.8 from about 40,000 ratings. On Google Play, it has a 3.7 from about 2,900 reviews. A spread like that usually means one of two things: Android users are getting a worse app, or a lot of iOS ratings came from in-app prompts at a happy moment. Either way, it's worth reading the low reviews on both stores before subscribing.

Trial and billing

The most common complaint in public reviews is about how the trial turns into a charge. One App Store reviewer described onboarding that pitched a 90-day plan, then revealed that only 7 days were free. Olive's response to that review said Apple, not Olive, requires payment authorization for trials, and that subscriptions fund its lab testing. Both can be true. Practically: set a reminder to cancel a day before the trial ends if you're not sure, because the annual plan can run up to $69.99.

The peptide business

This isn't a flaw in the scanner, but it's worth being aware of. Olive is now also a telehealth business that can sell you prescription peptides. An app whose job is telling you what's harmful in your food also has a product to sell you for your health. That isn't unusual (Tallow takes money from brands for placement and says so; no payment has ever moved a score), but you should know where a company's money comes from.

Olive vs Yuka

If seed oils matter to you, Olive is the better fit of the two. If you want free and established, Yuka. (Our hands-on Yuka review.)

Is Olive worth it?

Olive is a reasonable choice if you want one paid app that flags seed oils across food and cosmetics and you're comfortable with a subscription-first model. Go in with your eyes open on the billing, and treat any single score as a starting point.

The question I'd ask of Olive, or any scanner including ours, is the one that matters most for "lab tested" claims: when the app says a product has heavy metals, can you see whose test that was? Who paid for it, which lab ran it, when, and the original report? (Here's why that matters, and how to read a lab report yourself.)

An alternative that shows its sources

That question is what Tallow was built around. Tallow flags seed oils too, with a one-tap seed-oil standard that gives every product a clear yes or no and names the oil. It scores ingredients, ultra-processing and packaging on a published formula. And when a product has been lab tested, Tallow shows every report behind the score: the lab, who ordered the test, the date and a link to the original, from Lead Safe Mama, Mamavation, PlasticList, Consumer Reports, universities, brands and Oasis's own testing.

Scanning is free, so you can try it on the same products you'd scan in Olive and compare the reasons, not just the numbers. There's a restaurant map with a seed-oil-free filter in the same app.

Sources: Olive's App Store listing and Google Play listing (ratings, prices and features as of October 1, 2026); Olive's website (medical board, peptide program) and blog (heavy-metal testing of ~400 products). User complaints are paraphrased from public App Store and Google Play reviews. Yuka and Tallow comparisons are from our own testing on October 1, 2026.