7 ms·

Open Food Facts

145 points by lelf 7y ago

basilgohar 7y ago
I always get a little irritated, perhaps irrationally so, when I find another "open" project that uses a new or obscure content licensing scheme. In this case, they are using ones from the "Open Database" family, of which I am not familiar. Can someone clarify what, if any, advantages for consumers/users this has over one of the Creative Commons content licenses? If there is a code aspect to it, then please similarly explain the advantage it has over one of the BSD, MIT, Apache, or A/GPL-compatible licenses. License proliferation has been a real pain of late (past few years) and has muddied the waters significantly whereas many of these above-mentioned ones have largely stood the test of time and already serve a huge swath of the content world.
- rathel 7y ago
  In 2012 OpenStreetMap switched from CC-BY-SA to Open Database Licence. I think the most important is the provision that "produced works" need only to attribute the authors, and if you don't modify the source database then the license is non-viral.
  - nathcd 7y ago
    A summary of the reason for their change is here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_Changing_The_License https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_... Also worth noting is that OSM was on CC-BY-SA version 2 prior to the change. If I'm remembering correctly, version 3 or 4 of the CC licenses made it more amenable to databases, but I'll have to do a little more digging to see if my memory is serving me correctly...
- rhn_mk1 7y ago
  Databases are not always copyrightable, depending on the jurisdiction. There's a better explanation than I could possibly give here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_Changing_The_License#What_are_the_main_differences_between_the_old_and_the_new_license.3F https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_...
DoreenMichele 7y ago
My personal interest in such a thing would be health related, a la "Let your food be your medicine." Talking about medicinal uses of food tends to be highly controversial, and never mind the endless studies into health effects of various foods and the constant interest in diet and health. I don't readily see what kinds of "facts" about food they specifically desire or will accept. They may want to address that before someone comes along and starts adding facts that other people would object to for various reasons.
jniedrauer 7y ago
I'd love to see this data glued to an open source nutrition tracking app of some kind. Most nutrition tracking apps are designed for weight loss, use a limited proprietary database, and make questionable quality/design decisions. MyFitnessPal is probably the most complete platform in this space, but their backend code seems to be declining in quality recently, and their app does annoying comical things like shaming you for eating the exactly the amount you specified in your goal macros. Actively tracking your calories without developing an eating disorder is challenging enough, but they all seem to be hell bent on keeping users actively engaged instead of actually helping them hit their goals. I've halfway started on the project I want to exist, but it's one of those side projects I might touch every month or two, and I'm a long way from having any kind of viable product.
- boyband6666 7y ago
  I agree here. Also myfitnesspal doesn't let you easily correct things for being wrong; case in point many products list only the calories for something, and not the macros/nutrients. I often search for something as a proxy for what I made myself, so don't have the stats, but do know it doesn't have 0g protein, 0g fat, and 0g carbs. Basically it doesn't seem to want to help you flag things to make it better. A collaborative enterprise would.
  - scandinavegan 7y ago
    It is possible to correct entries in MyFitnessPal, but not easily, as you say. I sometimes come across entries that are 100 times off, so someone (a user, or pulled from a database) has entered e.g. 600 kcal for 1 g when it should clearly be per 100 g. That means I can either enter having eaten 0.4 of 1 gram, or try to correct the information. But when you try to correct it, you can't just say "multiply everything by 100" or add a new 100 g option. It's only possible to divide all entered macro and micro nutrients by 100 to get to the value per 1 g, which is tedious to do while cooking dinner for the family.
    - boyband6666 7y ago
      Yep, exactly this. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to let you suggest fixes, or flag things that are clearly incorrect, even if you don't fix them yourself - especially on something i pay for!
owenversteeg 7y ago
Looks fantastic! But why no price information? I'd suspect maybe for legal reasons, but there are other websites tracking prices in supermarkets...
- choward 7y ago
  I agree that this would be the ultimate tool for consumers, but think how hard if a problem this is. Do you track the price for every grocery store in the world. Where does that data come from? I think for starters that receipts should be provided in a format that's useful for consumers. Consumers could then contribute to keeping this database up to date. There is absolutely no consistency in the way stores print receipts and I'm pretty sure that's by design. The way business work is they want to be able to track you without you being able to track them.
  - owenversteeg 7y ago
    It's already a collaborative database using tons of user supplied data. How hard would it be to add another entry for (price, date, supermarket, location)? For example (€4.99, 25/3/19, Lidl, Berlin DE) There's already an app with a scanner, you could just walk down the supermarket and scan a few things and when you do you see the price displayed for your location (if available), if it's significantly different you can change it.
    - prewett 7y ago
      I don't think price would be very meaningful, since the price will be dependent on area. A major metropolitan area with a high cost of living will have higher prices, as will a small town that's 30 minutes from the nearest small city. And across countries, not only is there different tax rates, whether the tax is included in the price (US: no, Europe: yes, I believe), there is also the variation in exchange rate, which could be substantial. Then some stores may use the product as a loss leader, while others do not.
wtvanhest 7y ago
My son has a handful of food allergies (peanuts, Cashews, pistachios and unfortunately milk). When you say "traces" is that like the equivalent of "Made in a facility with X"? IMO, this could be very useful for people ordering phone online, but the packaging and definitions should probably be pulled directly from the manufacturer. For example, "Made in a facility with X, but we clean our machines every day to ensure no cross contamination" is a lot better than "Made on a shared machine with products that contain X".
- brlewis 7y ago
  I would not trust any online source for this. Some years ago I was buying chocolate for my daughter who has a peanut allergy. On a single grocery store shelf, some Hershey bars had peanut warnings and others didn't. I called the company and learned that some of their facilities are shared and some aren't, so you always have to check the packaging, even if it's the same product you've bought before.
  - scandinavegan 7y ago
    That's true. Two other situations that can trip you up is when a company changes the ingredients, without clearly advertising it, and restaurant chains with different preparation procedures. An ingredient change in Sweden that was minor, but still led to some confusion, was when the Marianne candy [1] changed the text from "May contain traces of milk" to "Contains <0.05 g of milk". Some vegans eat products with traces of milk, but the latter made it sound like it was something that was specifically added. Dairy products can also be completely added or removed from products without any other notice, which is something I'm not too bothered by if I make a mistake, but if I had a real allergy I might need to be more careful. Fast-food chains sometimes prepare the food differently between restaurants. The Max hamburger chain (or if it was Burger King, I don't remember) usually prepare the vegan options separately. But in some restaurants, due to space constraints, they fry the vegan products together with chicken products, or use the same counter space for preparation for vegan options and cheese. So if you care about this, you need to ask specifically in each restaurant, because they can't guarantee that they never come in contact in all restaurants. It's not enough to just look at the list of ingredients. [1] https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-120-g-original-bag https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-...
TomJansen 7y ago
What would really solve the problem of food tracking and diet apps is a QR code containing all nutritional values on the package of every food product. I really can't believe this is not implemented yet. It's law to put all nutritional values on the package (in Europe at least), so why not go a step further and make it machine readable?
- dublinben 7y ago
  What's the improvement of a QR code over the universally-present UPC barcode that is already in place?
  - Tomte 7y ago
    You need a database to link the UPC to the nutritional values. And the UPC needs to be in the database, which not every product will be. Grandparents wish was for the nutritional values to be encoded directly in the QR code.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      You can mandate manufacturers write the values to the database the same way you'd mandate that they print values on the packaging. You would probably use EAN or even GTIN rather than UPC to be more universal while you're at it. Edited to add: Using GTINs on actual articles might have made a slightly incremental improvement to life in current turmoil. Ordinarily of course competing supermarket brands in the UK aren't allowed to work together - that's a competition rules violation. But right now four half-empty trucks to four supermarkets makes no sense, so send two full trucks and you've got two other trucks to take stuff elsewhere. But the result is my local Brand X supermarket has Brand Y "own brand" products on some shelves. If a truck full of frozen vegetables arrives, and they're Brand Y vegetables, well, too bad, customers want food, they'll buy those just the same. But the codes for them don't work because each supermarket uses its own short (EAN-8) codes, since they never expect them to be used in other companies. So I can't easily buy those vegetables. I still will of course because I want food, there are _queues_ to buy food now. But if they used longer codes they could just share all the data across all the big supermarkets and it would Just Work™.
Brajeshwar 7y ago
I was once at a Coffee place, reading a book. There was a 50-ish guy at the adjacent table, explaining cryptography to a bunch of young 20-30 odds (perhaps first-time entrepreneurs). I could not help myself overhear them for 30+ minutes. When they ended their meeting, I asked the guy if I can take some more of his extra time to talk "interesting tech." He was elated, and we spent an additional hour or so just talking. I let him talk most of the time, interrupting him with "my usual dumb questions." He was part of a Startup sometime back that did some optical etching on medicines. With this, a standard Smartphone app can point to the medicine (tablets, etc.) and be able to track all the info on it. Any attempt to alter the data will result in, of course, corrupted/frauded data. So, I asked him if the machine do it for food. He was confident that it could be done but will likely be too costly for food items. I walked out happy, being able to talk to an interesting person. I'm not sure of any information or links, though. If this is something that interesting, it presents a lot of possibilities -- etch an "invisible barcode" on our food, that I can fish out my phone and track every detail about the food.
- solotronics 7y ago
  This is actually a really cool idea, thanks for sharing! With pubkey authentication you could even generate a new QR code for each box of food and sign it against the master for a company. Really cool!
  - beagle3 7y ago
    The problem with this (and GPs idea) is that you can copy a valid code from somewhere else; a "replay attack" of sorts. You have to somehow tie the signature to a verifiable but uncopyiable trait which is much, much harder than you'd expect.
    - solotronics 7y ago
      I'm not 100% sure this would work but possibly you could see a chain of custody of the product. If it says "I was delivered to Kroger yesterday. I was distributed by Kroger to grocery store #123 today. I was placed on the shelf by employee Bobby Circuits two hours ago." it would be hard to fake this
vansteen 7y ago
Used by many product checking apps. In France, Yuka seems to be the leader app ( https://yuka.io/en/ https://yuka.io/en/ ). Yuka uses the open food facts database to fill its own datatabase. This kind of app is used a lot here to verify the chemicals in a product. It already started to force food companies to change their recipes and to remove bad chemicals they usually put into their products.
zwieback 7y ago
Out of nostalgia for German foods I grew up with I clicked on two: a packaged whole grain bread and some Liverwurst, I would love to eat those two together. First gets an "A", second gets an "F". I guess I average out - awesome.
- draven 7y ago
  I guess the liverwurst got an F, and that's because of the fat contents? I'm eating keto-like and most of what I eat have terrible nutriscores because of fat contents. Meanwhile useless stuff like white sliced bread gets a B.
  - zwieback 7y ago
    High fat but also lots of preservatives, I think that's the killer. I've been planning on making my own, here in the US you can get "Braunschweiger", which is great, but in Germany any decent supermarket will have a dozen different Liverwurst varieties.
pkaye 7y ago
The USDA also maintains a big database of nutrition information. The older version had better features but unfortunately they rewrote everything and lost some of those features. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
pascalxus 7y ago
Personally, I like my food data normalized to a given calorie quantity so i can easily make comparisons and rank foods/recipes easily. I like to search for foods based on their nutritional content: micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. i couldn't find anything like that on the web. anyways, so i created: https://kale.world/c https://kale.world/c. (shameless plug, i know)
contingencies 7y ago
Founder of a food related robotics company here. There are a number of databases out there covering this sort of thing already, eg. USDA's NNDB. Some of the issues: not global in coverage, static entries where product formulae change, raw entries where products are typically cooked, variable cooking times, variable ingredients, new brand names/mergers, unknown products. Frankly if you want to know what is in your food precisely, the best way is to grow it in an environment that you control, and eat it directly instead of packaging, storing, preserving or transporting.
x02525 7y ago
I work for a diabetes prevention startup, and we found that https://myfitnesspal.com https://myfitnesspal.com and https://www.wikicalories.com https://www.wikicalories.com have most of the foods facts at least for the UK. However we also found that such crowdsourced info is often not reliable.

145 points by lelf 7y ago

I always get a little irritated, perhaps irrationally so, when I find another "open" project that uses a new or obscure content licensing scheme. In this case, they are using ones from the "Open Database" family, of which I am not familiar. Can someone clarify what, if any, advantages for consumers/users this has over one of the Creative Commons content licenses? If there is a code aspect to it, then please similarly explain the advantage it has over one of the BSD, MIT, Apache, or A/GPL-compatible licenses. License proliferation has been a real pain of late (past few years) and has muddied the waters significantly whereas many of these above-mentioned ones have largely stood the test of time and already serve a huge swath of the content world.

rathel 7y ago
In 2012 OpenStreetMap switched from CC-BY-SA to Open Database Licence. I think the most important is the provision that "produced works" need only to attribute the authors, and if you don't modify the source database then the license is non-viral.
- nathcd 7y ago
  A summary of the reason for their change is here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_Changing_The_License https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_... Also worth noting is that OSM was on CC-BY-SA version 2 prior to the change. If I'm remembering correctly, version 3 or 4 of the CC licenses made it more amenable to databases, but I'll have to do a little more digging to see if my memory is serving me correctly...
rhn_mk1 7y ago
Databases are not always copyrightable, depending on the jurisdiction. There's a better explanation than I could possibly give here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_Changing_The_License#What_are_the_main_differences_between_the_old_and_the_new_license.3F https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_...

DoreenMichele 7y ago

My personal interest in such a thing would be health related, a la "Let your food be your medicine." Talking about medicinal uses of food tends to be highly controversial, and never mind the endless studies into health effects of various foods and the constant interest in diet and health. I don't readily see what kinds of "facts" about food they specifically desire or will accept. They may want to address that before someone comes along and starts adding facts that other people would object to for various reasons.

jniedrauer 7y ago

I'd love to see this data glued to an open source nutrition tracking app of some kind. Most nutrition tracking apps are designed for weight loss, use a limited proprietary database, and make questionable quality/design decisions. MyFitnessPal is probably the most complete platform in this space, but their backend code seems to be declining in quality recently, and their app does annoying comical things like shaming you for eating the exactly the amount you specified in your goal macros. Actively tracking your calories without developing an eating disorder is challenging enough, but they all seem to be hell bent on keeping users actively engaged instead of actually helping them hit their goals. I've halfway started on the project I want to exist, but it's one of those side projects I might touch every month or two, and I'm a long way from having any kind of viable product.

boyband6666 7y ago
I agree here. Also myfitnesspal doesn't let you easily correct things for being wrong; case in point many products list only the calories for something, and not the macros/nutrients. I often search for something as a proxy for what I made myself, so don't have the stats, but do know it doesn't have 0g protein, 0g fat, and 0g carbs. Basically it doesn't seem to want to help you flag things to make it better. A collaborative enterprise would.
- scandinavegan 7y ago
  It is possible to correct entries in MyFitnessPal, but not easily, as you say. I sometimes come across entries that are 100 times off, so someone (a user, or pulled from a database) has entered e.g. 600 kcal for 1 g when it should clearly be per 100 g. That means I can either enter having eaten 0.4 of 1 gram, or try to correct the information. But when you try to correct it, you can't just say "multiply everything by 100" or add a new 100 g option. It's only possible to divide all entered macro and micro nutrients by 100 to get to the value per 1 g, which is tedious to do while cooking dinner for the family.
  - boyband6666 7y ago
    Yep, exactly this. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to let you suggest fixes, or flag things that are clearly incorrect, even if you don't fix them yourself - especially on something i pay for!

owenversteeg 7y ago

Looks fantastic! But why no price information? I'd suspect maybe for legal reasons, but there are other websites tracking prices in supermarkets...

choward 7y ago
I agree that this would be the ultimate tool for consumers, but think how hard if a problem this is. Do you track the price for every grocery store in the world. Where does that data come from? I think for starters that receipts should be provided in a format that's useful for consumers. Consumers could then contribute to keeping this database up to date. There is absolutely no consistency in the way stores print receipts and I'm pretty sure that's by design. The way business work is they want to be able to track you without you being able to track them.
- owenversteeg 7y ago
  It's already a collaborative database using tons of user supplied data. How hard would it be to add another entry for (price, date, supermarket, location)? For example (€4.99, 25/3/19, Lidl, Berlin DE) There's already an app with a scanner, you could just walk down the supermarket and scan a few things and when you do you see the price displayed for your location (if available), if it's significantly different you can change it.
  - prewett 7y ago
    I don't think price would be very meaningful, since the price will be dependent on area. A major metropolitan area with a high cost of living will have higher prices, as will a small town that's 30 minutes from the nearest small city. And across countries, not only is there different tax rates, whether the tax is included in the price (US: no, Europe: yes, I believe), there is also the variation in exchange rate, which could be substantial. Then some stores may use the product as a loss leader, while others do not.

wtvanhest 7y ago

My son has a handful of food allergies (peanuts, Cashews, pistachios and unfortunately milk). When you say "traces" is that like the equivalent of "Made in a facility with X"? IMO, this could be very useful for people ordering phone online, but the packaging and definitions should probably be pulled directly from the manufacturer. For example, "Made in a facility with X, but we clean our machines every day to ensure no cross contamination" is a lot better than "Made on a shared machine with products that contain X".

brlewis 7y ago
I would not trust any online source for this. Some years ago I was buying chocolate for my daughter who has a peanut allergy. On a single grocery store shelf, some Hershey bars had peanut warnings and others didn't. I called the company and learned that some of their facilities are shared and some aren't, so you always have to check the packaging, even if it's the same product you've bought before.
- scandinavegan 7y ago
  That's true. Two other situations that can trip you up is when a company changes the ingredients, without clearly advertising it, and restaurant chains with different preparation procedures. An ingredient change in Sweden that was minor, but still led to some confusion, was when the Marianne candy [1] changed the text from "May contain traces of milk" to "Contains <0.05 g of milk". Some vegans eat products with traces of milk, but the latter made it sound like it was something that was specifically added. Dairy products can also be completely added or removed from products without any other notice, which is something I'm not too bothered by if I make a mistake, but if I had a real allergy I might need to be more careful. Fast-food chains sometimes prepare the food differently between restaurants. The Max hamburger chain (or if it was Burger King, I don't remember) usually prepare the vegan options separately. But in some restaurants, due to space constraints, they fry the vegan products together with chicken products, or use the same counter space for preparation for vegan options and cheese. So if you care about this, you need to ask specifically in each restaurant, because they can't guarantee that they never come in contact in all restaurants. It's not enough to just look at the list of ingredients. [1] https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-120-g-original-bag https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-...

TomJansen 7y ago

What would really solve the problem of food tracking and diet apps is a QR code containing all nutritional values on the package of every food product. I really can't believe this is not implemented yet. It's law to put all nutritional values on the package (in Europe at least), so why not go a step further and make it machine readable?

dublinben 7y ago
What's the improvement of a QR code over the universally-present UPC barcode that is already in place?
- Tomte 7y ago
  You need a database to link the UPC to the nutritional values. And the UPC needs to be in the database, which not every product will be. Grandparents wish was for the nutritional values to be encoded directly in the QR code.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    You can mandate manufacturers write the values to the database the same way you'd mandate that they print values on the packaging. You would probably use EAN or even GTIN rather than UPC to be more universal while you're at it. Edited to add: Using GTINs on actual articles might have made a slightly incremental improvement to life in current turmoil. Ordinarily of course competing supermarket brands in the UK aren't allowed to work together - that's a competition rules violation. But right now four half-empty trucks to four supermarkets makes no sense, so send two full trucks and you've got two other trucks to take stuff elsewhere. But the result is my local Brand X supermarket has Brand Y "own brand" products on some shelves. If a truck full of frozen vegetables arrives, and they're Brand Y vegetables, well, too bad, customers want food, they'll buy those just the same. But the codes for them don't work because each supermarket uses its own short (EAN-8) codes, since they never expect them to be used in other companies. So I can't easily buy those vegetables. I still will of course because I want food, there are _queues_ to buy food now. But if they used longer codes they could just share all the data across all the big supermarkets and it would Just Work™.

Brajeshwar 7y ago

I was once at a Coffee place, reading a book. There was a 50-ish guy at the adjacent table, explaining cryptography to a bunch of young 20-30 odds (perhaps first-time entrepreneurs). I could not help myself overhear them for 30+ minutes. When they ended their meeting, I asked the guy if I can take some more of his extra time to talk "interesting tech." He was elated, and we spent an additional hour or so just talking. I let him talk most of the time, interrupting him with "my usual dumb questions." He was part of a Startup sometime back that did some optical etching on medicines. With this, a standard Smartphone app can point to the medicine (tablets, etc.) and be able to track all the info on it. Any attempt to alter the data will result in, of course, corrupted/frauded data. So, I asked him if the machine do it for food. He was confident that it could be done but will likely be too costly for food items. I walked out happy, being able to talk to an interesting person. I'm not sure of any information or links, though. If this is something that interesting, it presents a lot of possibilities -- etch an "invisible barcode" on our food, that I can fish out my phone and track every detail about the food.

solotronics 7y ago
This is actually a really cool idea, thanks for sharing! With pubkey authentication you could even generate a new QR code for each box of food and sign it against the master for a company. Really cool!
- beagle3 7y ago
  The problem with this (and GPs idea) is that you can copy a valid code from somewhere else; a "replay attack" of sorts. You have to somehow tie the signature to a verifiable but uncopyiable trait which is much, much harder than you'd expect.
  - solotronics 7y ago
    I'm not 100% sure this would work but possibly you could see a chain of custody of the product. If it says "I was delivered to Kroger yesterday. I was distributed by Kroger to grocery store #123 today. I was placed on the shelf by employee Bobby Circuits two hours ago." it would be hard to fake this

vansteen 7y ago

Used by many product checking apps. In France, Yuka seems to be the leader app ( https://yuka.io/en/ https://yuka.io/en/ ). Yuka uses the open food facts database to fill its own datatabase. This kind of app is used a lot here to verify the chemicals in a product. It already started to force food companies to change their recipes and to remove bad chemicals they usually put into their products.

zwieback 7y ago

Out of nostalgia for German foods I grew up with I clicked on two: a packaged whole grain bread and some Liverwurst, I would love to eat those two together. First gets an "A", second gets an "F". I guess I average out - awesome.

draven 7y ago
I guess the liverwurst got an F, and that's because of the fat contents? I'm eating keto-like and most of what I eat have terrible nutriscores because of fat contents. Meanwhile useless stuff like white sliced bread gets a B.
- zwieback 7y ago
  High fat but also lots of preservatives, I think that's the killer. I've been planning on making my own, here in the US you can get "Braunschweiger", which is great, but in Germany any decent supermarket will have a dozen different Liverwurst varieties.

pkaye 7y ago

The USDA also maintains a big database of nutrition information. The older version had better features but unfortunately they rewrote everything and lost some of those features. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

pascalxus 7y ago

Personally, I like my food data normalized to a given calorie quantity so i can easily make comparisons and rank foods/recipes easily. I like to search for foods based on their nutritional content: micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. i couldn't find anything like that on the web. anyways, so i created: https://kale.world/c https://kale.world/c. (shameless plug, i know)

contingencies 7y ago

Founder of a food related robotics company here. There are a number of databases out there covering this sort of thing already, eg. USDA's NNDB. Some of the issues: not global in coverage, static entries where product formulae change, raw entries where products are typically cooked, variable cooking times, variable ingredients, new brand names/mergers, unknown products. Frankly if you want to know what is in your food precisely, the best way is to grow it in an environment that you control, and eat it directly instead of packaging, storing, preserving or transporting.

x02525 7y ago

I work for a diabetes prevention startup, and we found that https://myfitnesspal.com https://myfitnesspal.com and https://www.wikicalories.com https://www.wikicalories.com have most of the foods facts at least for the UK. However we also found that such crowdsourced info is often not reliable.