Collective Achievements 2024
As we start this new year, let’s rewind the past year and celebrate what the Open Food Facts community has achieved!
It has been a rich year on many fronts, with more initiatives, efforts and leadership by the community members.
Our mission is to bring more transparency in the food sector by opening data on food products, prices and encouraging food actors to be more transparent too.
Open Food Facts has displayed the updated Nutri-Score 🚥 on our site and app to allow consumers to find the most recent and accurate information during the transition period.
The database continued to grow (3.5M products!) and its quality to improve thanks to committed contributors around the world! These gardeners of our digital common are the heart of the project and we are very proud to have them in our community 🫶 .
2024 was the year we rebooted our pioneering Open Products Facts, Open Beauty Facts and Open Pet Food Facts projects. New logos, brand new designs, and 2 years worth of innovation, including the ability to scan and add cosmetics, pet food and more, directly from the official Open Food Facts app. Most importantly, a strong basis to extend our impact beyond food, to empower more informed consumption choices.
Open Prices, which is the fruit of a workshop during the Open Food Facts Days 2023, has really taken off, with over 64,000 prices from all over the world! Already 4 different reuses have been created by members of the community, you can see them here. It’s also integrated right into the mobile application.
🔔 Before you take a closer look at all our collective achievements this year, Dr. Chris van Tulleken has a message for you !
The author of the best-selling book Ultra-Processed People, Dr. Chris van Tulleken tells us why he personally supports Open Food Facts & why it’s crucial that it remains independent.
A closer look 🔎
🥫 Database
- 3.5M products on Open Food Facts! 🤩 –> 500,000 new products in 2024
- Updated Nutri-Score launched on our website & app ! Already a reference place to get informed, as highlighted by the Father of Nutri-Score, Pr. Hercberg in this post.
- Data quality : from 4.8% of products with a data quality error to 3.8% (kudos to @BenBenBen, @Alizarine, @MarieFache, @Aleene, @Sebleouf, @NaruYoko, @jayaddison, and many more)
- 64,000 prices on Open Prices.
- 341 new producers onboarded to the Pro Platform (+ about 100 vs 2023). Read a testimonial from a producer.
💻 Plateforms / Tech
- Relaunch of Open Products Facts, Open Beauty Facts & Open Pet Food Facts
- The Open Food Facts, Open Products Facts, Open Pet Food Facts and Open Beauty Facts database and images repository were merged on disks, now being a global large database of products.
- 📱✨Mobile app: Many improvements, fixes and new features in the mobile app, some of which were featured in our advent calendar of features on social media (Mastodon):
- Open Products Facts – Open Pet Food Facts and Open Beauty Facts support
- Price addition & visualisation
- Product page & Edition visual glow ups
- A better photo gallery
- Better multilingual support
- Folksonomy Engine in Alpha
- 🫶 kudos mobile team, in particular Pierre, Edouard, Mr. Tanuki, Valentin.
- New machines were put online (for the tech infrastructure) to cope with ageing machines and growing traffic.
- A lot of improvements to infrastructure to cope with the many requests we get
- Nutrisight: the final frontier! We are now able to extract nutrition facts from a single picture. You can test it now in https://hunger.openfoodfacts.org/nutrition and it will soon be available on the website and the mobile app.
- A new, more secure, more enjoyable Open Food Facts account system based on Keycloak is going to launch soon (🫶 kudos John and Hangy)
- Pro platform improvements (👏Antoine, Success)
- Ecobalyse integration in Open Food Facts (Martin)
- Spellcheck (a short talk by Jeremy who implemented it)
- Moji provided us with a new server with GPUs
- Efforts for more accessibility
- Signal Conso: in France, users can now directly report a product from the Open Food Facts site/app to the official instance through a button linking them to a claim form.
🙋♀️🙋Community
- Community members stepping up to the challenge on the internationalisation front: Marius (project grantee 2024) & ambassadors: April (Belgium), Louis (Canada)
- Administrators from other countries
- Krishanti from India wrote incredible articles article using OFF database
- Researchers continue to use our open data to advance science (Testimonial from Dr. Aulesa)
- Hackathon to unlock food data with French ministry offices (Recalls, School meals, Food supplements & many other ideas)
- First donation match campaign (1,575€ raised in 3 days) 💌 Our usual fundraiser is on-going if you wish to support our non-profit.
- Corporate volunteering via Vendredi platform (20 volunteers)
- Translations (via Crowdin)
- Open Food Facts fully translated in Dutch by Annelotte 🧡
- 735 220 translated words and 83 441 approved words
- 228 new translation contributors & 293 active translation contributors
- The following members were celebrated with Contributor trophies🏆👏:
- Raphaël O.: initiator of the Open Prices project
- M. Tanuki: Major contributor to the mobile app since its launch
- Alex F.: Contributor involved in Hunger Games, adding products, as well as a regular representative of the project at various events.
- telperion87: Largest Italian contributor of all time🇮🇹 & the 3rd largest editor of Open Food Facts.
- Marie: Contributor committed to data quality and product editing.
- Annelotte: Faithful contributor of translations and product additions.
- Segundo: 2nd largest Open Food Facts product editor (his contributor story in fr)
- Some members have celebrated their 10 years as contributors, like Tacite!
- International members join the Open Food Facts association & new members on the Board of Directors (take a peek into our last General Assembly). Become a member too: https://donorbox.org/open-food-facts-association-membership
- Users: in 2024, Open Food Facts site has had 38M of visits worldwide, with these 5 top countries:
- We welcomed fantastic work-study students like Charlotte & Valentin and also Jérémy, along with Mélanie, who joined the permanent team as an administrative assistant.
🌇 Events
- Open Food Facts Days: 2024 edition 🎇 last September
- We’ve welcomed contributors from various cities in France, but also from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom (England & Scotland).
- Many exciting presentations by community members (here’s the playlist)
- Pro Day 2024 in Paris with key speakers (watch replays (FR) here) ↘️
- Representing Open Food Facts at international events :
- FOOD2030 in Brussels
- Empodera Live in Malaga
- EIT Food à Rome
- OSXP à Paris
- FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels
- Mieux Manger au Ciné
- NEC 2024
- Scan party in Rennes & Lyon (kudos Alizarine, Charlotte) and several in Cayenne (with Vanessa Izéros a public health nutritionist)
- Tackling Food Packaging effort in Poitiers, FR
- Perl hackathon
- Organisation of Quebec Games using Open Food Facts data (thanks to Louis)
🤝 Partnerships
- We were supported in a government program, the AIC (Accélérateur d’Initiative Citoyennes) – watch our (fr) testimonial here (from min 16.16)
- AIC helped us a great deal in building stronger relationships with French public institutions, enabled the organisation of a hackathon on food data, and supported us on structuring our fundraising approach.
- A meeting with the EREN (French Nutritional epidemiology research team) who use Open Food Facts database in their large-scale study NutriNet-Santé to see how we can further help advance research in public health.
- Open Food Facts recognised as a digital public good by the DPGA: an initiative endorsed by the UN Secretary-General that facilitates the discovery and deployment of digital public goods
- Participation in the Digital Common Policy Council to advocate for the digital commons (view full report here)
- We continue our occupation of a small office in a “third-place” at the heart of Paris – at Les Arches Citoyennes (a short interview on our cohabitation there)
📰 Open Food Facts in the news
- BBC coverage (Morning Live and BBC World Service)
- The Guardian on ultra-processed food.
- included in the Use Case Observatory report
- Mentions by Pr Hercberg & Pr Touvier in several media
- Podcasts: Projets Libres podcast (fr), Jeunes Pousses, Sixième Sens (20 Minutes)
- M6 INFO in food additives.
Together, yes we scan !
As we close the chapter on 2024, we are so very grateful and proud of our amazing community. 🍊 Each contribution — big or small — has played a part in shaping a more transparent food system.
Thank you all for your passion, creativity, and commitment to our digital common that we continue to build, nurture, and grow. And let’s carry this momentum into 2025!
Here’s to another year of impact, collective action and innovation, together! 🥂🧡
