Know what you eat: Open Food Facts opens the data for 100K food products from 177 countries

We eat 3 times a day, but we know very little about what we eat. To make it easier to better choose our food, more than 4600 individuals – like you and I – have been scanning barcodes of food products and taking pictures of their ingredients lists and nutrition facts table to contribute them to the collaborative database Open Food Facts.

The project started in France 4 years ago, and the database now contains data for 100,000 products from over 177 countries. In the last year alone, we doubled the size of the database and the momentum is just accelerating even more across the planet.

Open Food Facts is available or will soon be available in over 30 languages.
Translators, Photographers, Editors, Coders: We need your help to bring food transparency to a kitchen near you!

All the data is published under an open data licence which allows anyone to re-use the data and build new apps, services and products on top of it. There are now more than 30 re-uses for things we could not have imagined, from health and fitness apps, special diet apps, to connected objects, scientific studies, and press investigations.

Here are some  examples of how Open Food Facts data is re-used:

• HowMuchSugar.in is a global game to sensibilize children about sugar using local products they are familiar with.
• Across Europe, MadeNear.Me is taking advantage of Open Food Facts to make Food Factories transparency happen.
• US Data Scientists are creating exciting data-visualisation using the US base that keeps growing. Kaggle World Food Facts.
• Italian app developpers have developped Magnifico Reader, an app that performs live Computer Vision and uses Open Food Facts to create an augmented reality experience around products.
• Researchers and journalists from many countries are taking advantage of the sheer size of the base to perform analysis that just could not be done with such accuracy before.
• And we can’t wait to see what international makers and developpers will come up next to expand Open Food Facts and use it in ways that are relevant to their communities.

Join the Food Revolution today by downloading the App on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone or Ubuntu Mobile, and scanning products from your country.

Spread the word around you and mobilize your community to keep building and improving food transparency in your country, one product at the time.

Would you like to get involved? Send us an email to contact@openfoodfacts.org or join us on the Open Food Facts Slack.