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... and this is why people with severe allergies always always always read the ingredients list, even if the packaging has not changed. And always carry emergen
by kabdib 11y ago
... and this is why people with severe allergies always always always read the ingredients list, even if the packaging has not changed. And always carry emergency medication.
- Godel_unicode 11y agoI feel like that kind of comparison is a good candidate for a side project. Take picture, OCR, compare to old list, turn red if it's different
- reustle 11y agoWould be a cool app project. "Scan" each label as you put it in your cart, and see if it rejects it or not
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThe problem is, the ingredients can change without the UPC code changing. You would need manufacturers to purchase and use unique UPC codes for each version of their food formulations.
- gkop 11y agoNeither parent nor grandparent references UPC. Grandparent references the list of ingredients.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoSorry about that! I didn't assume someone would suggest having a mobile device OCR an ingredients label, versus looking up a UPC code tied to an ingredients list and groking for your allergies. One is easy, the other is hard.
- cbhl 11y agoOCR isn't that hard, just expensive. You do a first pass with an algorithm, and then use Mechanical Turk to correct for errors.
- khedoros 11y ago> One is easy, the other is hard. There are APIs and libraries for OCR, so that might not be so bad (even on a mobile device). A low-end phone is faster than the first PCs I did OCR on anyhow, and about 20 years more research has gone into algorithms.
- bduerst 11y agoYou wouldn't even need to scan labels per se, you could just take a picture of the box and identify the food item that is the largest in the FOV. If your ingredients data is getting stale, you could reward users with coupons for stale-data items, so some users will take pictures of the ingredients list (kind of a 'bounty' list). You could do this for new items too - e.g. a popup after the picture is taken saying you can get $0.50 off if you take a picture of the UPC and ingredients list. Do a visual diff on the ingredients photo to see if the they have changed, and if so, OCR it to the database.
- pyre 11y agoDo the manufacturers change the UPC code when they update the ingredient lists? I doubt it. It's still technically the same item (and probably the same internal SKU too).
- bduerst 11y agoNope, but for new items in the database or if packaging changes drastically, you would need the UPC to join the update with previous data.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoIf anyone actually starts this project, be sure to record two more data points: - price of product - food mass of product Those vary invisibly all the time, and it'd be great to have a record of it.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoAnd records the congolmerate that actually owns the brand. So many food brands are now just meaningless words in someone's brand portfolio. Especially silly when the two main competitors for an item turn out to now be owned by the same parent and rationalised to be made in the same factory. They get traded around like football cards.
- jlg23 11y agoAnd also get a very, very good insurance. Bugs in such an app can kill people.
- bduerst 11y agoI worked on an idea/project a couple years ago to OCR prices off of shelves in grocery stores. Basically you could scan an isle in Safeway and have a geo-based price list of grocery goods. After talking to people about it though, it became apparent that most grocery shoppers already have an idea of where they are going to buy groceries, making location more important than price. It's a razor thin industry, and even the price-sensitive coupon-using folks almost always just go to the closest Safeway equivalent.
- 11y ago
- jeromeflipo 11y agobuild on http://openfoodfacts.org http://openfoodfacts.org?
- teolemon 11y agohttp://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&search_terms=kraft%20macaroni&sort_by=unique_scans_n&page_size=20&action=display http://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&... We have them :-) We also store every single revision of the product, but we don't display the changes yet. Join us on http://slack.openfoodfacts.org http://slack.openfoodfacts.org to see how we can just do that.
- jerf 11y agoSince I've discovered I've had celiac (the real deal) ~6 years ago, I've read a lot more ingredient labels than I used to, and I can vouch for the fact that food formulations change more than you'd expect without fanfare. For all that you might find "gluten free!" splattered all over a lot of things, I can tell you there have also been a lot of foods that have silently gone gluten-free over the years, along with trying to minimize their use of the other major allergens. This includes even very big name brands, such as Doritos. For a long time, Doritos was gluten free in nearly all of its flavors except its "default" Nacho Cheese flavor. Suddenly and silently, it went gluten free. I don't know exactly when because I wasn't looking. I was actually trying to show someone that only that flavor had the wheat in it, except the bag went and contradicted my claim. I may have missed it but I don't think they ever publicized it, or if they did, it wasn't much. (Contrast, for instance, Corn Chex which has talked about being gluten free on its box now for years after it changed.) Imitation crab meat is another example; it has gone from reliably containing wheat, to unreliably being gluten free depending on brand, to what appears to be converging on generally not containing wheat, just in the past few years. I'll still be checking labels for a while on that one, though. (And before the inevitable commenter pops up: The things that I do not know whether they contain wheat are, pretty much by definition, the highly-processed foods high in refined carbs, so my examples have a selection bias in that direction. I do not eat either of the things I mention often or in quantity. But I'm not always 100% in charge of my food environment and it is nice at someone else's party to be able to eat something sometimes.)
- eveningcoffee 11y agoI can tell you there have also been a lot of foods that have silently gone gluten-free over the years, along with trying to minimize their use of the other major allergens. Good find! But as have been indicated here http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35727244 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35727244 , this may be counterproductive.
- blairanderson 11y agoYou're conflating disease and allergy.
- gberger 11y agoIsn't doing this illegal? Since it makes people think they're buying the same product they always have but it has actually changed. At least in Brazil, every time the formula of a product, or the quantity in the package, is changed, companies have to disclose that on the packaging.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoIt was disclosed on the packaging.
- pkaye 11y agoIt is disclosed in the packaging. They just didn't do a big promotion prior to the change.
- mikeash 11y agoWhen you say "disclose that on the packaging," do you mean something more than just changing the list of ingredients printed on the package? Here, the packaging must describe the contents and that description must be accurate, so changes must be reflected there. But nothing requires them to say "hey, we changed this" beyond changing the nutritional information, which most people don't pay attention to.
- 11y ago
- lettergram 11y agoHaving multiple allergies that can kill me, I always read the ingredients, and even check online. For example, ice-cream manufacturers make ice-cream with peanuts in it on the same line as everything else. However, because they clean it between runs it's supposedly fine, and wont list it... It's all good until I have a reaction and have no idea why. If you have allergies it's a great reason to learn to cook your own food. As said, you should also always carry and EpiPen and other drugs.
- pyre 11y ago> If you have allergies it's a great reason to learn to cook your own food Yes, but they may severely limit your life-choices, and it also defeats the purpose of ingredient labelling (if you can't rely on it).