
Open Food Facts - lelf
https://world.openfoodfacts.org/
======
Brajeshwar
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
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
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
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

~~~
beagle3
Only if every participant along the way played along and was dependable. You
are talking 10 distribution levels and hundreds of employees. Good luck with
establishing such a system, blockchain or not.

Bitcoin works because you don’t need trust, not because everyone is
trustworthy.

------
jniedrauer
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.

~~~
sergeo
Shameless plug (from one of the developers) - you might want to give a try to
our app/website - MyNetDiary
[https://www.mynetdiary.com](https://www.mynetdiary.com) .

1) We prioritize user experience and health over profits - there are no ads,
no user data sharing, even account creation is optional, and all advice, all
materials are carefully prepared and reviewed by RDs and CDEs.

2) Technology-wise it's as state-of-the-art as it gets - fully re-written in
Swift 5, modern UX, ruthlessly optimized for minimum of taps, fully
configurable (even the Dashboard), with awesome apps for Apple Watch and
iMessage, with AR Grocery Check tool, etc.

3) Food database (805,000 items) is our crown jewel – if something is not
correct or missing, users can send photos of food packages and nutrition facts
from the app, we will verify and correct or add the food to the database.
Thus, the database has no duplicates and as complete information as available.
This is a free service for our users.

The Android app and web app are on par.

~~~
jniedrauer
The easiest way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an
incorrect answer. You might have already solved this problem. I will
definitely check this out, thanks.

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TomJansen
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
What's the improvement of a QR code over the universally-present UPC barcode
that is already in place?

~~~
Tomte
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
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™.

------
basilgohar
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
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
A summary of the reason for their change is here:
[https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_...](https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Historic/We_Are_Changing_The_License)

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...

------
contingencies
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.

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wtvanhest
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
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
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-...](https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-120-g-original-
bag)

------
vansteen
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.

------
pascalxus
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)

------
zwieback
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
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
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.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

------
x02525
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.

------
pkaye
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/)

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

~~~
choward
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
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
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.

