Is there price information as well?
You could try hooking up the UPC to a pricing API like https://semantics3.com (Disclosure: I am one of the founders)
Open Food Facts – A free food products database
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Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#42I don't get why there is a East-Germany option in the left sidebar select.
It's a bug, thanks for spotting it. I'd be very interested to see what kind of food products were available in East Germany though!
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#43Geez. I was looking for a "free food products" database and was disappointed to find a "free, food products db" :/
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#44First: looks great, well done.
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?
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#45Would 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.
In the UK this is commonplace as a way to 'cheat' when displaying nutritional information.
For example; displaying the fat, sugar, etc contained in half a bag of crisps prominently on the front, and claiming this is a serving size.
I find the practice completely ridiculous and misleading, practically worse than simply not having the information at all (the stats per 100g, etc are still displayed on the back).
Who eats half a chocolate bar? Half a bag of crisps? Half a microwave meal? Drinks half or a third of a can of coke? Even if they did, almost without fail the other fraction would be consumed within the same day anyway.
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#46Geez. I was looking for a "free food products" database and was disappointed to find a "free, food products db" :/
Open Food Facts is free as in speech as well as free as in Beer (The Open Food Facts database is available under the Open Database License.
The individual contents of the database are available under the Database Contents License.
Products images are available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence).
But you're right, we still haven't got a Free as in Beer, Beers category :-P
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#47I love this idea.
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?
Hope that this takes off.
My family is using lactose free and gluten free products, and accurate information is hard to come by.
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#48Great idea -- as a user of Musicbrainz, it's right up my alley. I went ahead and made some updates to a nutella http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/009800895007 page, and it works as I'd expect.
The Android app has problems, though.
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.
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.
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.
4. Pressing physical back button in "scan" mode does not go back: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-android/issue...
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#49Nice! 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.
(Sorry for brevity)
Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database
#50This is a fantastic idea. 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. 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] I would get some legal…
Valid concerns, and I share your sentiment about the inexcusable behavior of large-scale food manufacturers, but wouldn't it be better to focus on getting some real traction before wasting mental energy on what might happen; or investing in potentially unnecessary and costly legal counsel?
To my knowledge, they're not divulging any info that isn't already public - not to mention it could take a long time for this to ever reach a critical mass in which a manufacturer would care to go on the offensive towards them.
Probably would be best to keep grinding, build traction - and then pursue legal counsel; when you've got some revenue to pay for such things or even capital investment if that is a road the founders wish to pursue.
Actively working to keep everything open source & decentralized is a great insurance against those types of adversaries anyway.