A New Open Price Challenge
Context and first challenge
Open Prices is an Open Food Facts project to collect and share prices of products around the world. You can easily contribute by adding your receipts or taking pictures of prices in stores, helping you track your spendings or following the price evolution of a given product. The data is publicly available so that can it be used for research, analysis, and more.
In February 2025, the project’s community launched its first price contribution challenge. During 30 days, the goal was to gather as many prices as possible on a specific product category. We’re happy to announce that over 1000 prices of Nutella and other hazelnut spreads were added by contributors!
The challenge was a good crash test for the new AI-assisted capabilities of Open Prices, so we were also pleased to see that over 10,000 prices from 4300+ pictures of all product types were added during that period.
A look at the data
Even though most contributions came from shops in Europe, hazelnut spread prices were recorded for 200+ unique products. Assisted with the power of the Open Food Facts database, this sample is enough to start highlighting patterns :
- Big brands such as Nutella tend to diversify a lot in their packaging size (17 unique products), with a direct effect on price per kilogram of product, ranging from 6€/kg to 30+€/kg.
- Still, alternatives are available, with more than 90% of products not belonging to the famous brand.
- Sugar quantities do not seem to be a factor in price variation. More sugar doesn’t necessarily mean a cheaper product.
- However, hazelnut percent and usage of palm oil are key factors to price variation. As expected, products with more hazelnuts tend to be pricier. The same can be said for products without palm oil, with some exceptions.
We believe that there is a lot more to learn with this dataset, an export (https://huggingface.co/datasets/TTx-hf/open-prices-hazelnut-spread-challenge) is available to play with this challenge data. More in-depth analysis can also be made on the full Open Prices Dataset (90k+ prices).
If you’re building something with these datasets, let the price team know, we’ll highlight it on the community reuse page: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/open-prices/discussions/562.
What’s next ? A new challenge ! 🎯
Contributors do not wait for a challenge to keep adding prices, however, with Easter coming, and all that talk around egg prices, we believe April is a great time to launch the second community challenge!
When ?
Starting from 19/04/2025 to 19/05/2025
What ? 🥚🍳
All eggs are welcomed! Chicken, quail, chocolate, bad ones or good ones, if there’s a price attached, we’re interested.
How?
- Snap Pics— visit 1 or more grocery stores, take photos of shelf labels for eggs
- Upload & Share— visit the Challenge Page and upload your photos (proofs) + date + store name
- Optional— help Validate by reviewing A.I.-generated details from your photos or other volunteers’ uploads
OR
📱You can also use the Open Food Fact App to contribute https://world.openfoodfacts.org/open-food-facts-mobile-app :
- Scan a product
- Scroll to the bottom panel, “Prices“
- Tap on “Add a price”
- Add a proof (picture of the shelf label) and follow the form.
Why?
- To support Open Data: advance the movement for open and accessible data
- To empower Citizens: help inform + empower citizens by making food prices transparent
- To advance Science: enable low/no-cost research at the intersection of food affordability, access, nutrition, and sustainability
- To gather feedback and help on Open Prices.