Fresh off the success of its February relaunch, the American heritage personal-care brand Suave is leveraging product safety apps like Yuka to drive in-store sales at mass retailers like Walmart and Target.
“This new generation of value shoppers is super savvy when it comes to ingredients, things they want, and especially things they don’t want in their products and their formulations,” Rafael Lopes, vp of innovation and brand equity at Suave, told Glossy.
As part of the brand’s reinvention, Lopes — whose CV includes two decades across BeautyCounter, L’Oréal and Unilever — has been tailoring Suave’s new product development to align with the results seen on product safety scanning apps and search returns.
“One of the interesting shifts that we’re seeing now, and this is also coming a lot from working with our retailers, is how AI and certain apps became part of regular shopping trips to Walmart and Target, and even online shopping,” Lopes said. “For example, people are using Yuka to choose everything [they buy while in-store shopping], and we’re now taking that into consideration from the early stages of [NPD].”
Launched in France in 2017, the Yuka app started as a tool for French shoppers to better understand the health impact of packaged food products while browsing the aisles of a grocery store and has since expanded to include personal care ratings.
In the past year, Yuka has grown from 14 million U.S. users to around 23 million while increasing its global user base from 56 million to 75 million. As of this month, around 7.8 million products are scanned every day, according to Yuka co-founder Julie Chapon.
A favorable score on Yuka drives personal care sales, Lopes said. For example, he told Glossy that Suave’s February Dry Shampoo launch sales were partially driven by scores on the app, based on its own research and consumer feedback. “Our Dry Shampoo score was 76 out of 100 on Yuka, which is unseen at the price we offer,” Lopes said.
Lopes told Glossy that white space in the mass body-care market has emerged as consumers use these new tools to source information about potential purchases. “[The mass consumer has been tracking the trend] toward derm-inspired skin care, where specific skin needs and specific ingredients are the star of the launches, but they didn’t have access to that [in mass stores],” he said. “They were totally priced out.”
According to a 2024 survey by Mintel market research company, around a third of U.S. consumers report paying more attention to the ingredients in their body-care products than they did a year ago, with some looking specifically for active ingredient callouts or skin barrier-repairing properties.
To fill this space, Suave is launching a range of new body care at Walmart. Out on Monday, the new Advanced Skin Solution body-care line includes five body moisturizers priced under $6 each. Each targets a specific concern including sensitive skin, dull skin, dry skin or extra dry skin, plus one offering for normal skin. Each formula is allergen-, paraben- and dye-free, dermatologist-tested and cruelty-free, Lopes told Glossy.
“It’s the first time that a value brand like ours will offer products such as a prebiotic-infused lotion that is fragrance-free, [products that] target over-sensitized skin, or something with ceramides, which is an ingredient that is extremely popular but still used in brands that are priced much higher,” he said.
According to Circana, U.S. prestige beauty industry sales revenue remained flat year-over-year during the first quarter of the year while beauty’s mass market increased 3%. Zooming out to look at the first half of the year, prestige sales increased 2% to reach $16 billion, while the mass sector grew 4% to reach $34.6 billion.
“When I’m formulating, I’m also taking [scanning app scores] into consideration to say we should avoid certain things, because that helps with the overall rank and profile for this formula.” However, to lean even deeper into this strategy, Lopes recently began working with Yuka to best predict product scores ahead of launches, a free offering from Yuka that’s growing.
“Around 250 U.S. cosmetic brands have contacted us over the past six months to understand their ratings,” Yuka’s Chapon told Glossy. “Of those, about one-third specifically indicated that they were looking to improve their scores.”
What’s more, Lopes told Glossy that Suave retailers like Walmart and Target have reorganized their brick-and-mortar store shelves to better suit the order in which shoppers often scan products for information.
“[Young shoppers, especially parents,] are literally changing how products are displayed in stores because of how they are searching for them using apps like Yuka,” Lopes said. So far, retailers are beginning to reorder in-line products by routine order and other methods that mimic how and what users are scanning in-store, Lopes said.
As previously reported by Glossy, Suave’s U.S. and Canada business was purchased from Unilever by Yellow Wood Partners in 2023 for an undisclosed amount. The brand sells around 250 million products per year through retail partners like Walmart, Target, CVS, Dollar General and Walgreens, and across grocery stores. Walmart is its largest sales channel. According to Suave, the brand’s annual retail sales are around $700 million.
