Welcome

Today we are excited to launch openfood.ch - an open access database on information about barcoded food products sold in Switzerland.

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.

What we are launching is only the first version of openfood.ch. We make no claims on completeness of the data, but with over 14,000 products in the database, we are off to a good start. We hope to leverage the crowd to help us grow and maintain a high quality database. In the near future, we’ll expand the crowdsourcing functionality of the site substantially.

That said, we realize that there are many different sources of open data on food that exist in Switzerland. In this context, we are excited to be an independent partner of the upcoming open food data hackdays, which will take place on February 10 & 11, 2017, concurrently at EPFL in Lausanne and at the Zhdk in Zurich. More information about this event, and a registration form, can be found at https://food.opendata.ch.

This is just the beginning of a long journey. On the one hand, we’d like to provide much more data on food products than what is currently on the label. For example, with DNA analysis getting cheaper by the day, it’s quite possible that we’ll soon be able to allow users to upload DNA sequence data of food products (see https://opensnp.org/ and http://www.swissdecode.com/ for inspiration).

On the other hand, it’s clear that a lot of food is consumed that doesn’t come with a barcode - think about the meals we eat in restaurants, for example. In this case, we’ll need another approach to capture the nutritional contents of food, such as estimating it from a picture. The openfood.ch team is working hard on this problem and will soon open a second API that is based not on barcodes, but on images (image recognition API). Rest assured that it will be open, too!