Openfood – Open access info about barcoded food products sold in Switzerland | Hacker News Reader

Openfood – Open access info about barcoded food products sold in Switzerland

openfood.ch

206 pointsfgeorgy40 comments

There was a hackathon this weekend at EPFL, Switzerland and some of the teams were working on this dataset. Quite a few interesting hacks came out of it. A few interesting ones were : * an app to check for allergens * an app which lets you know what are the "healthy" recipes you can make using a particular product * an app which lets you take a photo of a restaurant menu (ANY restaurant menu !!), and then uses the openfood dataset (along with a few other openly available dataset) to give you a health footprint of all the food items !! I would say datasets like these are pretty rad !! Its painful to collect them in one place thats why there are not plenty of them around.... !!

Lauzhack hackathon! http://lauzhack.com

I've been thinking about the need for such a database as well and it's great to see such a project launching in Switzerland. What I would find particularly useful (and existing databases like migipedia.ch unsurprisingly don't offer) is the tracking of any changes in the recipes of the products. I believe it's a well known secret that lots of retailers keep adjusting the recipes - usually for cost saving purposes.

How good enough are we able to follow the recipe?

Are you thinking of copying the "ingredients" list that is on most of the products?

Yes, exactly. How much sugar, salt, etc.

I was telling my wife last night about the Migros (a swiss retailer) smartphone application that I've started using recently (allows you to access list of new products, special prices, reduction code, list of recent purchase etc). Crawling the application I found it gave me a list of the most frequently purchased items per category (dairy product, vegetables, fruits, pastry, etc.). I told her how interesting it would be if I could just, from this list, select what I eat and when and I would get a nutrition report out of it.

The application already has nutrition data and list of ingredients for most item so it's hopefully not far from happening ! Problem is I probably won't be given access to it...

WolframAlpha can combine nutrition information for a series of items, to generate an aggregate "Nutrition Facts" label. Ex.:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20slice%20pizza%20%2b...

Years ago I applied for API access with the intent of making an app for diet tracking, but was denied. (And from what I've heard, queries would have been prohibitively expensive.)

Migros has an extensive api they use internally for everything. There was an article about as it uses a php symfony stack.

It may be possible to get access to it so I would definitely ask if you are interested in creating an app around it.

The calorie/nutrition application I use is able to do this, CRON-O-METER. It has many existing food products, and even allows you to add your own recipes or custom foods and generates a nutrition label for them. It also generates many aggregate trackers. I use it to keep track of my food and exercise, which works well for me as I follow a diet of--each whatever I want as long as it fits in my calories and hits my nutrient quotas, which means I no longer feel bad if I want some junk food as long as it's those bounds. The only disadvantage is you can't view historical aggregated data, only "raw" data without paying for a subscription, but I've gotten by without a subscription for a good while.

You're talking about manually entering what food you eat (I believe).

GP is talking about the fact that the supermarket already knows every item you buy and keeps it in their big database. This could easily be used to track nutrition with little to no user input.

There is also http://openfoodfacts.org/

And it's been around for a while. Plus they have Android, iOS, and Windows phone apps for users to submit new data.

Yeah, sometimes I’m really annoyed about the lack of collaboration between different open source projects. Asked them if they plan on working together: https://twitter.com/jancborchardt/status/800805611822665728

Because their first sentence is just incorrect:

> Is there a need for such a database? Absolutely. Today, there is no database on Swiss food products that is truly open, free, and - perhaps most importantly - programmatically accessible via an API).

- Swiss products http://world.openfoodfacts.org/country/switzerland

- API http://world.openfoodfacts.org/data

Granted, Open Food Facts needs some design improvements. But why work on a Swiss-only system with nice design when there is a way bigger and more established platform already in place.

+1 We have http://android.openfoodfacts.org http://ios.openfoodfacts.org to check products (and more importantly liberate products :-)

Also, we're looking for all the help we can get: barcode scanners, designers, programmers, translators, communicators, you name it

Come scan with us ;-)

Pierre

Does any one know what data source(s) MyFitnessPal barcode scanner uses?

UK is fairly comprehensive i know. Id assume the US is too.

I believe it is primarily user generated data.

Hi! I work for Lifesum, their competitor. We have a mostly crowd sourced barcode database connected to our food. That works pretty good actually and people are keen to adding food with correct values and connecting the barcode. Here in Europe products are usually added before they hit the shelves because users get them as samples or similar. I believe that we may have a bigger database than MyFitnessPal because they are very US centric while we have a user base spread out all over the world (including the US of course). Further on, if we presume our database is bigger than MyFitnessPal, we probably have the most complete food / barcode database in the world.

Thanks for the reply. You have a new Lifesum user.

I was under the assumption they used a combination of user submitted data and the USDA's food database.

Switzerland is again number one in innovation (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/the-most-innovative-c...).

I live in Zurich. Due to the high-living standard, salaries, size, central location in Europe, Switzerland is probably the only country, where I would like to live longterm.

(I am a software engineer who turned into a tech recruiter: Read my story: "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" - https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)

I'd imagine most people would probably love to live in Switzerland, but isn't it also stupidly hard to get a work visa if you're not already an EU citizen? IIRC the company has to prove to the government that nobody in Switzerland or the EU could do your job

If you're not already an EU citizen, it is hard to get into the canton of Zurich, that is true.

However, it is possible in January as there are fresh quotas. And if you make senior-level salary, it is easier. Also, i depends on the company (they have to have proper documentation their hiring efforts). However, the government official from the immigration services is making the final decision.

There was a similiar site a while ago. I forgot the link. I remember only that it was yellow :)

They should link to site like this one: http://fddb.info

Maybe Codecheck.info?

Interesting dataset for augmented reality purposes as well. Collect more pictures about the packages and you could overlay specific data on a view of store self (for example highlight products suitable for your diet)

This makes me think of the observation that "you can't inspect quality into a product."

I mean, what are the use cases for this database? It seems like a fetishization of data for data's sake.

You can use the Barcode to tie things together... smart pantries and stock monitoring depends on standardised(ideally free) access to identifiers for the goods

The two that I can think of in the time taken to read this comment are easier calorie tracking and avoidance of food allergens.

I'll nest a few of more here:

* Searching alternative foods based on macro composition of a product.

* Searching alternative brands to a product, for price, availability or healthier contents.

* Tracking changes in a product.

* Discovering products based on some user input.

Maybe entrepreneurial HN isn't the place to criticise projects which aim to bring free metadata to important consumer markets.

Checking what ingredients a product has (or how many calories it contains) seem like necessities only if you are dealing with mysterious processed food. I'll go out on limb here and assert that these problems don't really arise with traditional ingredients or preparations.

Seems like a likely losing strategy with this audience.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here? I think you may be over-reading the critique of Soylent and assuming that everyone's gone in the opposite direction to cook-from-scratch all the time?

Well, I was trying to make a normative rather than positive observation. So, to raise the issue how food "should" work rather than how it does.

In that sense I think Soylent would be technically fine if it was clinically proven to be safe in a very rigorous way, but I know a lot of people who would never buy the idea because they have a different vision of how the world should be.

The quote below from the openfood.ch website implies that the database is needed because it does not exist. We need a more robust normative debate than that.

"Is there a need for such a database? Absolutely. Today, there is no database on Swiss food products that is truly open, free, and - perhaps most importantly - programmatically accessible via an API). The latter point is particularly important as it allows for the creation of an ecosystem around open food data, one of the main goals of openfood.ch."

Why do we need a normative debate at all?

Because leaving everything up to a completely unregulated market is not a good idea. Nobody believes that it is.

So we need a more robust normative debate about the justification for the existence of a database (that serves only for fetishization of data for data's sake), because leaving everything up to a completely unregulated market is not a good idea?

I don't see how your argument makes any sense.

We do need to think about where we are going and why. That applies with any new system, whether it's driven by the excitement of creating a cool data ecosystem, or just a raw profit motive. Whether this particular system is "useful" or not is not a good test: a lot of silly things get traction, and a lot of worthwhile concepts fail.

It's not enough to be an engineer and build "cool stuff". You have to consider the consequences.

(I'm using "we" language because I believe in some kind of socialism and strongly object to the narratives being proposed by blockchain enthusiasts or seasteaders who want to give up on the idea of any kind of state authority)

Food tracking is an important part of many services, ranging from fitness/calorie tracking style apps to diabetes management.

However, keeping and maintaining an accurate food database is a big, costly, task that makes adopting new markets harder and obviously adds a substantial maintenance cost for each market.

Projects like this makes more markets accessible, especially small ones as cost per potential user is higher, and lay the foundation for cross-service-collaborations (i.e. log in your fitness app and the data shows up in your diabetes app as well).

Incidentally, I run a startup - Tummy Lab [1] - that tracks food intake and analyzes the data for co-relations between food and stomach issues.

If someone is looking for partnerships with regards to keeping food databases, feel free to contact us!

[1]: https://www.tummylab.com - swedish only, sry :/

That is probably the cutest startup name I've come across.

Food nutritional information and packaging photos are essential for B2B foodservice applications where purchasing decision makers are looking for quality data that's quick to find.

It's less of a need for B2C applications, but still an important factor depending on the product or brands target consumer. The "label reader" persona is an easy one to see value.

These exist commercially, the one I'm most aware of is SmartLabel: Bacon Example: http://smartlabel.labelinsight.com/product/2709932/nutrition

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