Open Food Facts

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Open Food Facts, caratteristiche principali

website with huge database
for Android
for iOS
for Windows
Open source

What we present to you today is not one simple application but a truly collaborative project to create a global database of all foods. Open Food Facts in fact it is not just an application for smartphones, but behind it there is a gigantic one community of enthusiasts who want to share information.

Let's start from the site: up Open Food Facts find a searchable database. Simply enter the name of a commercial product on sale and if someone has already entered it you will be able to find the product with the photograph, the list of all the ingredients and any Nutri-Score (not yet present in Italy). It is also possible to add all the nutritional values always accompanied by photographs to give greater information Force and truthfulness in your entry.

Open Food Facts, the Wikipedia of food

As you may have understood, it is a sort of Wikipedia of commercial food, where anyone can insert something and help other people choose products based on their needs, which could be food allergies or intolerances, metabolic diseases, ethical or religious diets.

This gigantic and constantly evolving database is also present in the form of a smartphone application. The application is well made, it's free, Open source and naturally devoid of additives And tracers. From the application it is possible to scan the products thanks to the barcode present in the various packages, or if you prefer to manually enter the corresponding number. In this way you can check if the product is in the database and read the description and possibly improve or modify it.

If you don't find anything, you can add the product by inserting as many features as possible including photographs of the ingredients, the box and any other information that you may consider important for others.

Everything is then translated into many languages to be read and used all over the world!

Download

As we were saying, it is possible to consult the database by going to their website, or it is possible to install their application on Android devices (also by downloading the APK) and iOS. There is also a desktop application version for Windows.

And Yuka?

One of the most famous applications in this genre is precisely Yuka and you also asked us to include it or at least talk about it. Yuka is very beautiful graphically and is also widely used. It's not a bad application and the fact of being independent and having neither advertising nor external financiers is certainly a positive thing.

However it is not an application to open code, contains 4 tracers and 16 permits ¹ and for several years has decided to stop using the open Open Food Facts database in favor of their own private database ². It is also possible that they used the famous open database as the basis for theirs, a choice that is not exactly ethical or correct ³.

1. Yuka on Exodus[↩]
2. How was the database created?[↩]
3. Post about Toad's Mastodon[↩]

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