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Open Food Facts – A free food products database

world.openfoodfacts.org

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Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#31

Post by stephanebiz »

desdiv wrote: post #9

Would it be possible to display the data on a "per package" basis instead of the usual "per 100 g" or "per serving" basis? 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 brand of that food you're eating.

It's definitely possible. There's a game that uses the Open Food Facts data and asks you to guess how much sugar there is in a product (the whole package). It also uses the same physics engine as Angry Birds (box2d) to make sugar cubes fall: http://howmuchsugar.in/

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#32

Post by repple »

stephanebiz wrote: post #17
codereflection wrote: post #14

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. 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…

Indeed it will be very interesting to see how products evolve over time. Open Food Facts also has a "Food Archeology" project. The idea is to find old products and put them in the database as well. Anyone knows soda cans collectors? :-) Something very interesting as well is to compare products accross different countries, first to identify differences, and second to see if there is a correlation between those differe…

There's an interesting NPR Planet Money article on a related topic http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/06/05/319084976/why-a-pa...

It might be difficult to track the products which change labels as ingredients change.

Another interesting idea would be to see how product lines evolve. Watch as the product line is split into two or more lines to target different types of consumers (or merged for that matter), while at the same time keeping record of ingredients and other interesting info. Sounds fun!

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#34

Post by stephanebiz »

j2kun wrote: post #15
teolemon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price would be quite difficult to track, but I guess an app using Open Food Facts data could do it using crowdsourcing :-)

Apps track gas prices quite easily...

True. But there are only a few different types of gas, and in the US alone, there are 50000 new food products introduced on supermarket shelves every year: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodMarketingSystem/new_pro... And there are also many more places that sell food than gas (proof is that places that sell gas almost always sell food too). But with enough motivated individuals, anything is possible, price tracking included.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#35

Post by cl42 »

simonecasc wrote: post #20
cl42 wrote: post #8

This is fantastic. 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. "Future vision squared" would be to personalize nutrition recommendations / advice to each person, but I'm dreaming.

for nutrition research I think http://examine.com is a pretty good resource

Woah, haven't heard of them before. Thank you!

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#38

Post by wsc981 »

teolemon wrote: post #7
ics wrote: post #3

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…

The API is there. As for the incomplete products, you can drill them down by status if you want to help complete them. You can pick and choose from http://world.openfoodfacts.org/states For instance, here are the US products with photos selected, but still in need of nutrition info: http://us.openfoodfacts.org/state/photos-validated/state/nut...

The API seems extremely limited. It seems you can find product info based on barcode or something, but there doesn't seem any way to submit products using an API. Of course with scraping one could "fake" and API, but that kind of sucks ...

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#40

Post by teolemon »

wsc981 wrote: post #38
teolemon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API is there. As for the incomplete products, you can drill them down by status if you want to help complete them. You can pick and choose from http://world.openfoodfacts.org/states For instance, here are the US products with photos selected, but still in need of nutrition info: http://us.openfoodfacts.org/state/photos-validated/state/nut...

The API seems extremely limited. It seems you can find product info based on barcode or something, but there doesn't seem any way to submit products using an API. Of course with scraping one could "fake" and API, but that kind of sucks ...

For now, you have a write API being built at http://world.openfoodfacts.org/data and http://en.wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Project:API If you'd like to use the API to contribute or help improve it, send a mail to contact at openfoodfacts dot org.
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