I read the blog post Using Open Food Facts as a Stock Tracking App in Germany with interest as it is against food going waste.
In the JSON response for product returned based on barcode, I was not to able to see any field for best before date. Is it there & am I missing it?
How does the Smantry App handle best before date?
Hey! There should be the field expiration_date for the products that have it. You can see every field here, in the API documentation.
Thank you!
Actually what I was looking for is the duration (like 12 months or 5 days etc) the food item stays good according to the label. Don’t know if this is required to be shown in other countries but packaging in India has this info. I find this useful to store food items of short & long life accordingly.
Is any there any field related to this? If not, is this of general value & interest to be considered for inclusion?
Actually what I was looking for is the duration (like 12 months or 5 days etc) the food item stays good according to the label.
For the duration of the item still in the closed packaging, you can refer to the expiration date. To get the “duration” you could do expiration_date - today_date.
For the duration of the item with an open packaging (eg. milk already opened) sometimes there is a label about how much time you can store that in the fridge or something like that, at least here in Italy.
Is any there any field related to this? If not, is this of general value & interest to be considered for inclusion?
If with duration you just mean the first option I gave, I don’t think it’s meaningful to include it in the database. Let me know if it’s different in India!
A majority of packaged food items in India have both a best before date as well the duration a food item stays good for.
I wish to classify food items by their shelf life & store them accordingly so that food doesn’t get wasted due to bad tracking. I want to be aware of the shelf life of different categories of food items. I understand this may not be a common concern. While expiration_date will help me with a single item, knowing the shelf life of that food category (of say Nuts) will help me store it appropriately.
Can you help me understand why expiration_date which will vary for individual items of same product should be in the master database?
In any case, while adding some items to the Open Food Facts database through the Android app, I noticed that there is also no field to capture expiry date.
Can you help me understand why expiration_date which will vary for individual items of same product should be in the master database?
So that we can track the most recent version of the product, which is usually the one with the latest expiration_date.
For Open Beauty Facts (for cosmetics), we do have a “Period after opening” field, but we don’t have it on Open Food Facts.
Maybe it’s something we could add, with 2 different fields:
It would also be useful to have preservation fields (before and after opening), to know if it must be kept in the fridge etc.
I request to have “Use by date” label added soon for food items.
In my humble opinion, highlighting this for all food items can help in food wastage. An awareness of how long different food groups (like bread, eggs, butter, grains) last can help consumers eat healthy & make better choices when they choose product sizes.
I like that a majority of food items have this info on packaging labels, possibly because it is mandated.
There is no English beginner article that there is a new API (Folksonomy Engine - Open Food Facts wiki) for OpenStreetMap-style tagging (key=value). It is very helpful to know it, but I only find it after searching the wiki, as another user wrote about it.
Just install the user-script from:
As @fabi2 already pointed out, that could be added in the folksonomy engine.
I’m also developing a new frontend that enables that by default.
You can check it’s progress and open issues here:
I liked the UI & speed with which your OFF-Explorer loaded.
When you say “I’m also developing a new frontend that enables that by default.”, can you please clarify what you mean by “enables that by default”?
Can you help me understand the link between having “Use by date” captured for each item to be saved in the database & Folksonomy Engine?
Using the folksonomy engine without a custom script.
There are a lot of properties that are useful to different users, and that’s why we started the folksonomy engine. In this way, properties are not added to every product and can be added dinamically when requested (like WikiData or OpenStreetMap). Read more at Folksonomy Engine - Open Food Facts wiki.