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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

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™.

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™.