I love this idea. I have wanted to build something similar for a long time.
One of the key features I believe would be to track ingredient changes over time, per product.<p>I put a great amount of effort into purchasing products without specific ingredients for the allergy concerns of my family. One of those is High Fructose Corn Syrup. I had finally found a brand of BBQ sauce that was HFCS free, and used it for quite a long time. One day I became curious if the ingredients had changed, and sure enough, the company had started using HFCS at home point.<p>Tracking these sorts of changes of course requires a great amount of crowd-sourcing effort, but I believe that it's worth so much more than the effort put in. In my case, it was just HFCS, and not much of a problem. But had it been one of the allergens that we have to avoid, that would have caused a much bigger problem.<p>Great work, keep it up! I look forward to contributing.
Would it be possible to display the data on a "per package" basis instead of the usual "per 100 g" or "per serving" basis?<p>I'm not a stupid person, but I still can't for the life of me figure out why the food industry deemed it necessary to invent a psudo-unit, "the serving", that differs depending on what food you're eating and what <i>brand</i> of that food you're eating.
This is a fantastic idea.<p>My only worry is that the owners will be legally hounded from every corner of the world due to the fact that most large food corporations don't really want you to know what's in their products.<p>Like the fact that "orange juice" is basically rancid orange sugar water left sitting in large vats for up to a year that is doused with orange oil before sale, apparently. [0]<p>I would get some legal cousel were I persuing this venture.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/orange-juice-is-premium-juice-actually-more-natural-1.2902004" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/orange-juice-is-premium-juic...</a>
Great idea -- as a user of Musicbrainz, it's right up my alley. I went ahead and made some updates to a nutella <a href="http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/009800895007" rel="nofollow">http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/009800895007</a> page, and it works as I'd expect.<p>The Android app has problems, though.<p>1. The barcode scanner doesn't work, at least on the product I mentioned above. I tried it with the Barcode Scanner app, and it works fine there.<p>2. No barcode search. Since I used the Barcode Scanner app to get the barcode, I wanted to try to paste the result into OFF. No go.<p>3. The scan help text "Scan the barcode to find or add a product" is very hard to read on a dark background. There's probably a better way to show this help text.<p>4. Pressing physical back button in "scan" mode does not go back: <a href="https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-android/issues/21" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-android/issue...</a>
Today I learned that you can graph data from the website.
It's a great way to see how one can make better decisions with open food facts <a href="http://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&tagtype_0=categories&tag_contains_0=contains&tag_0=breakfast%20cereal&sort_by=unique_scans_n&page_size=20&axis_x=sugars&axis_y=fat&graph=1" rel="nofollow">http://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&...</a>
I was interested and then surprised on visiting the site that there seemed to be quite a few listings. However, most of what I clicked on had no nutritional information (a few lines of "?" instead). I would be much more likely to add information if I could easily see either a list or table of products which have been added (i.e. name and a picture) but have no/missing data. Also as rpedela has mentioned, an API would be helpful for adding and consuming the data.
First: looks great, well done.<p>The problem with other food databases I've seen is the amount of duplicate or incorrect information. Are y'all actively taking steps to curtail this?
I'm dreaming of a "GPL" food movement, where the process of making the food in question can be inspected by anyone at any time, and where the ingredients and sub-ingredients that went into it are also recursively "open source". There would be a Sourceforge/GitHub/YouTube site where you could upload and view videos of those inspections and leave comments.<p>Then you could even have a 100% "open source" product label when all the ingredients and sub-ingredients you used were also "open source".<p>You may ask: why would anyone other than paid food inspectors be interested in checking out those places? For one, it can be very educative to take your kids to show them how things are made. If you have allergies you may be interested in double-checking claims. It could also be an alternative fun thing for people into geocaching, for example to help "complete" the "100% open source" label for a given product.<p>You may also ask: why would anybody in the food industry be interested in making their food open source? Why would they want to give up their trade secrets? Well, for one not every product has to be mysterious: e.g., bread is bread, you just want to know if any suspicious additive has been used, and if your bread is good you want people to know it. It can be a marketing tool. You could prove that your product is 100% organic/local/kosher/gluten-free/peanut-free, etc., because all of the sub-ingredients have been verified to be the same as well, and you've crowd-sourced the work of verifying this.<p>Thoughts?
Neat! I was thinking about an optimal design for a similar idea just the other day. Motivated by the lack of accountability by food producer/manufacturers - and lack of a venue for consumers to voice concerns.<p>This was a direct result of a jar of honey I had qualms about (and probably an aggregate of other concerns & thoughts that we all build up over time on topics like this).<p>I wrote the producer an email, but would much prefer voicing my opinion public - seems that would be a far more effective way to get the issue resolved.<p>Anyway, I gave it a go with this Open Food Facts site. Here's the product I added:<p><a href="http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5220400060/raw-organic-honey-honey-bunny" rel="nofollow">http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5220400060/raw-organi...</a><p>My first impression is that the interface is a tad cluttered.<p>Secondly, some of the categorization fields on the Add Product page are redundant.<p>Last & most importantly: my most desired use-case for this application is not actually accommodated for.<p>In addition to the detailed product info, which the site does a nice job of allowing me to enter, I want to be able to leave feedback about the product itself.<p>For example, with this particular jar of honey my main gripe was the film/plastic foil residue left on the outer rim of the jar when you first open it up. It's great that this product is in a glass jar, is 100% raw and organic - but when little chunks of plastic foil end up in my honey it totally invalidates those benefits.<p>Anyway, the feedback feature could be as simple as a comment thread below the page. And perhaps thinking a bit father out, ideally: an Amazon style review system.<p>Either way - love the progress so far, props for a great app already.
This looks like a great free alternative to Nutritionix and/or MyFitnessPal. I've never been approved for a MFP API account. I'm definitely going to be checking this out!<p>So many places charge outrageous sums for this data, especially if you have UPCs. I didn't see UPCs anywhere on the site- any plans to track those as well?
Really nice - especially seeing as a lot of things I'd actually find in a supermarket are there.<p>Is there any way to get a database dump of some sort? I managed to find a Open Food Facts API on Github, but I'd imagine it might be better to be able to export data so I'm not chewing up resources on Open Food Facts' server.
A wiki for food nutrition info, nice work and good to see there's already considerable community support.<p>One odd thing I noticed while at first browsing with Javascript disabled is clicking the site logo in the top left opens a file upload dialog. Not sure exactly what purpose using an input element for the logo is.
As the comments point out, apart from immediate use to consumers, it can also help understand underlying temporal trends and perhaps with some data analysis suggest healthier substitutes based on user tastes.<p>However, as part of a course project in using Convolutional nets for image recognition, I was wondering, what if, we could simply take a picture of a rack in a grocery store and augment the image with the overall "healthiness" heatmap.<p>And now to the meat of the problem, data. Is there a readily available dataset on which the image recognition can be trained? Note that each product will need to have a images taken from a variety of angles and lighting conditions. There exist methods to automatically generate alternate sets of images, but they are not perfect and we would still need data.
Something else that would be quite useful is to include links to the international names of each product so that you can compare their ingredients.<p>For example, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes [1][2] are called Frosties in the UK, France [3] and some parts of Europe, but do not have identical ingredients.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosted_Flakes" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosted_Flakes</a><p>[2] <a href="http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/038000219634/frosted-flakes-kellogg-s" rel="nofollow">http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/038000219634/frosted-...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5053827104081/frosties-kellogg-s" rel="nofollow">http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5053827104081/frostie...</a>
Hi teolemon, if you're still following:<p>Please consider allowing multiple barcodes for an individual product. I live in the USA, where (because of tradition and archaic technology) some grocers don't like to market products bearing only EAN barcodes. So, many imported items have both UPC and EAN barcode.<p>I hit a different case today: a box of 20 pieces with one barcode, but the individual item inside has a different barcode.<p>Maybe the functionality is already there, but I couldn't figure out how to do this.
This is fantastic.<p>One "future vision" if I may -- actually tracking, sharing, recommending, etc. nutrition research. I think one of the most painful things for everyone interested in nutrition is actually knowing what the research says about what they need to eat, when, how, etc.<p>"Future vision squared" would be to personalize nutrition recommendations / advice to each person, but I'm dreaming.
I love this idea.<p>One question, do you have any mechanism for verifying the data is correct? I see that the submitter can upload a picture of the nutrition data that is on the food packaging, but if that food is not packaged in a can, but fresh food, how can the data be verified?<p>Hope that this takes off.<p>My family is using lactose free and gluten free products, and accurate information is hard to come by.
Made a "quick" graph of which brands have the most carbohydrates (for food products that aren't just sugar).<p>Kind of neat, but I've never heard of a lot of the brands. (Most of the data is from France, turns out.)<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/i3gOQS3.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/i3gOQS3.png</a>
Love the concept. Tried adding products with the Android app- it would be good to add more details than just the name and pictures (on the app that is)<p>Also encountered a bug for a new product ingredient. The unfortunate part is that it lost all the data that I had entered till then.<p>Looking forward to contributing.
Thanks for creating this. I use the USDA nutrition database in my cookingspace.com web portal. I am interested in all things food (work in a community garden, maintain a 100 year old irrigation ditch for a historic farm, and cooking is a major hobby). Thanks again.
Nice! I want to know how much of each ingredient is in the food.
I want the tool to automatically collect the nutritients and vitamins and other components from ingredients and subingredients, and sub-sub-ingredients, etc.<p>(Sorry for brevity)
I like the idea of a free database and the implementation.<p>I had used www.codecheck.info before, it's a similar database with a community. It started as a university project, though the community content is now owned by a company.
Not "open" but a much better resource, at least for now: <a href="http://nutritiondata.self.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nutritiondata.self.com/</a><p>Maybe these guys can catch up.