OpenFoodFacts.org - "Wikipedia of food"

I love food and all aspects related to it. I participate in online forums like Seasoned Advice (which provides great insights on food safety, cuisines, hacks etc) have completed a 7-week course on Nutrition on Coursera, and keep exploring ways to eat healthy.


I was happy to find recently the "Wikipedia of food" - OpenFoodFacts.org 


Launched in 2012 by Stéphane Gigandet, the website crowd-sources food information from across the globe (over 145 countries).

OpenFoodFacts has a system to assign scores to information about food products uploaded to its site through their app.

This is useful for foodies & nutrition buffs to make the right eating choices and see how a product compares against a global database of similar items.

As it is open data, anyone can re-use it for any purpose. It has been featured on Kaggle. 

Open Food Facts has been a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code in 2018, 2022.

Having both used & contributed to the database, I'm impressed with the OCR capabilities of Google Cloud Vision that have been utilized to extract the ingredient list even from low resolution photos of food packaging. 

At the current time the site has info on 4000+ products from India. Country specific info can be accessed from the Advanced Search page.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) grants Licenses or registration numbers for food businesses in India & sets guidelines. This body is responsible for ensuring compliance. 

As the food and nutrition awareness among the general public is low, they end up making bad choices.

There is a Smart Consumer app from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs; Food and Public Distribution in association with GS1 India (a global, supply chain Standards organisation) that claims to have details of 3,45,41,593 products (all categories not just food-related) in its database directly uploaded by brand owners. However app users have complained that often the details are too scant or missing for the products they have scanned.

OpenFoodFacts can serve as an independent resource on the nutritional quality of  food products and enable consumers to better understand food labels and draw logical conclusions.

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