Hacker News Reader

This looks like a great free alternative to Nutritionix and/or MyFitnessPal. I've never been approved for a MFP API account. I'm definitely going to be checking this out!

So many places charge outrageous sums for this data, especially if you have UPCs. I didn't see UPCs anywhere on the site- any plans to track those as well?

View on HN

Totally agree that most company charge a fortune for using the data that their customer entered for them :) ... I guess if you have a free app you should know that you are the product. And yes MFP doesn't allow access to their API except if you are an already established company with thousand of users, again it make sense given their business model. OFF has UPC has well, if you download the app you can scan a product and if it doesn't match the database you can add the information and attach the pictures of ingredients and nutritional info.

Open Food Facts uses UPCs to identify products, it's the primary key of the database, and it's available on each product page.

Food data needs to be public, free and open, it's way too important and useful to be kept behind a paywall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com