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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

#21

Post by stephanebiz »

schoen wrote: post #18

Is there a way to use this database to determine if a food product is suitable for vegetarians or vegans?

We are trying to build a taxonomy of ingredients so that we can automatically analyze the ingredients list and find out if it's suitable for vegans, vegetarians, people who cannot eat gluten, lactose etc. There's still a lot of work to do, would you like to help?

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#22

Post by teolemon »

schoen wrote: post #18

Is there a way to use this database to determine if a food product is suitable for vegetarians or vegans?

You have all the labels available at http://world.openfoodfacts.org/labels but you still should of course exercise caution and read the packaging.

http://world.openfoodfacts.org/label/vegan http://world.openfoodfacts.org/label/vegetarian

Power tip: you can actually look for several criterias: eg: http://world.openfoodfacts.org/label/vegetarian/label/organi... or http://world.openfoodfacts.org/label/vegetarian/category/puf...

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#24

Post by leetrout »

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!

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?

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#25

Post by stevewilhelm »

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.

FDA calculated the reference amounts for persons 4 years of age or older to reflect the amount of food customarily consumed per eating occasion by persons in this population group. These reference amounts are based on data set forth in appropriate national food consumption surveys.

[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#28

Post by simonecasc »

leetrout wrote: post #24

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! 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?

Totally agree that most company charge a fortune for using the data that their customer entered for them :) ... I guess if you have a free app you should know that you are the product. And yes MFP doesn't allow access to their API except if you are an already established company with thousand of users, again it make sense given their business model. OFF has UPC has well, if you download the app you can scan a product and if it doesn't match the database you can add the information and attach the pictures of ingredients and nutritional info.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#29

Post by stephanebiz »

leetrout wrote: post #24

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! 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?

Open Food Facts uses UPCs to identify products, it's the primary key of the database, and it's available on each product page.

Food data needs to be public, free and open, it's way too important and useful to be kept behind a paywall.

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