
Ask HN: Open source food? - bitesociety
I&#x27;m planning to start a snack food company and would like to make everything transparent and opensource (formulations, manufacturing processes etc)<p>Would like any advice or feedback from those who are involved in the opensource.<p>Are there any concepts or methods that could translate from software?
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stasel
I know there is something called open source Cola:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
source_cola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_cola)

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bitesociety
Thanks, wasn't aware of it. Seems its dead now, have to read up on why it
didn't take off..

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matt_the_bass
I think there is a value to this not because I want to replicate your product
but because I want to know more about what’s in the food. For examples, what
are the ingredients for “spices” and “natural flavors”?

I have a couple of reasons:

1\. I want to know what crap i put into my body. If I’m going to eat crap, I
want it to be my choice and I want to k ow what’s in my food.

2\. I have a kid with severe peanut and tree but allergy. 1st such in our
family. Now I have to read every package. I can’t tell you how frustrating
that is.

On a related topic, you may wish to consider including open sourcing your
cross contamination prevention policies (if any) so that those with food
allergies can have a clear picture of if they can eat your food safely. If my
wife and I are not confident in the (lack of) cross contamination, we don’t
let our child eat the food even if there are no tree nuts or peanuts listed.

Before having a kid with such allergies, I thought so many parents were over
reacting. I mean, few people my age have them, so it wasn’t a thing when I was
a kid. It worries me why the rates of food allergies are so drastically
higher. I suspect it has to do with eating more processed foods. I’m not
opposed to processed foods, but I’d like to know if/when I’m eating them and
what they are.

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bitesociety
Thanks, hadn't thought of that angle before.

Yes would release all that information (basically what we know, we want our
consumers to know, if they desire)

eg- agree on natural flavours, thats a big pet peeve of mine (I have no idea
whether it's vegan or not, most cases am forced into a decision i'm not happy
with)

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matt_the_bass
Oh good point. I hadn’t thought about vegan/not-vegan question. Though I eat a
lot of vegan foods I’m not vegan, but I could see this being important to
those that are.

You could conceivably extend this idea to listing sources of ingredients for
those that are concerned with ingredient sustainability.

From my point of view the idea would not be to try and replicate the product
but to have greater trust in it.

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bitesociety
Understand, and yes plan to share source for ingredients, where I can find
them out myself. Thanks

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jakobegger
I work a lot with Open Source software (both as a user and as a contributor),
and the most important question is:

Who is your audience?

Everything else depends on the answer to that question.

Do you mainly want to tell your customers how you make your product? Then
start a blog, hire a photographer, and post on Instagram.

Do you want to reach DIY bio hackers? Then put your recipes on Github.

Do you mainly want to share knowledge with other companies in your industry?
Then maybe forget the internet and go meet people in real life at a trade
fair.

I contribute to a bunch of different Open Source projects, and they all have a
very different audience. Some have mostly users that just want to use the
product (nobody is interestedin contributing), while more technical projects
see more contributions from users. For the former, website and easy install
instructions are more important; for the latter Github and API docs are more
important.

So the lesson I would take from Open Source: Think of your audience first, and
the best way of distribution follows from that.

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bitesociety
Thanks

The audience is mainly other vegan entrepreneurs (or those who want to be) so
we can help each other with formulations and industry knowledge. It's a
mission driven company End consumers to a minor extent, as I guess some of the
formulations are not useful without machinery to make them.

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palidanx
Shameless plug, but I run [https://www.menutail.com](https://www.menutail.com)
which creates nutrition facts labels when you are ready at that stage of your
business.

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bitesociety
Thanks, will take a look when at that stage

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detaro
There's people sharing recipes for soylent-like meal replacements:
[https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes](https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes)

Regarding concepts from software, not sure. Source control is an obvious one
for versioning, wikis make good documentation, but those aren't that software-
specific...

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bitesociety
Thanks, that DIY soylent is a good home-brew case study. I guess I have more
other food companies in mind.

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rthomas6
Sorry if this comes off as snarky, but how is this different than recipes?

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bitesociety
Not snarky at all. It's mostly about the manufacturing process (machinery,
settings, process etc) that would make it different. This would be for a
factory made product. THanks

