Julie Chapon: EDHEC of the Year 2025

During the Paris edition of EDHEC Rendez-Vous 2025 — the School’s annual alumni event — Julie Chapon, EDHEC Master 2011, and co-founder and CEO of Yuka, was voted EDHEC of the Year. The award singles out an alumnus whose career exemplifies the spirit and values upheld by EDHEC and its community: entrepreneurial mindset, ability to transform the business world and desire to make societal and environmental engagement central to one’s work. 

Yuka: disrupting industries and re-thinking corporate purposes

Julie Chapon was one of the first business creators to be supported by EDHEC Entrepreneurs. She joined the Station F incubator in its early days, where she developed Yuka, the app that analyses food items and cosmetics from a nutritional and health standpoint. The app, which she has managed since 2016, is now available in 12 countries. Every day, some 70 million people use Yuka to decode food and cosmetics labels, assess the consequences of the products concerned on their health and thus make more insightful choices. In less than a decade, the app has become an advocate of the “consume better” movement, so much so that it has prompted certain agrifood and cosmetics giants to revise the composition of their products. “In France, the app has prompted manufactures to reformulate certain products”, explains Julie Chapon. “Intermarché, for example, has reformulated 900 products and removed 142 controversial additives. Between 2019 and 2025, we observed a 13% reduction in the number of high-risk additives in France. There have been some highly significant decreases in the average number of high-risk additives in certain categories: 75% for cereal bars, 58% for breakfast cereals and 48% for ready meals”.

The company obtained B Corp certification in 2024, with a score of 93.2 out of 100, and has held France’s “company with a mission” label for two years. Both these recognitions are consistent with Julie Chapon’s vision and her focus on Yuka’s practical utility “Being recognised as a “company with a mission” was fundamental for me, because it really describes who we are”, she explains. “Our actions are defined by their positive impact on users and brands, rather than by monetary inflows. With B Corp, our environmental charter covers governance, the choice of banks and energy suppliers, without forgetting third parties (customers, suppliers, stakeholders) and the incorporation of user opinions”.

Business model: designing a third way 

The award of the EDHEC of the Year prize to Julie Chapon not only recognises the success of Yuka and her entrepreneurial career, but also hails her belief in the existence of another kind of business model. “We often make a distinction between nasty companies that only want to make money and nice not-for-profits and NGOs that work for the common good”, states Julie Chapon. “But these are not the only two types of structures; impact companies represent a third way. Yuka is a limited company that creates value through people that pay for our services, but with the goal of having a positive impact on society.”

Read the interview with Julie Chapon on the EDHEC Alumni site.