Is the raw food allowed?

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1

Hello!

I’m starting to use OFF, and I want to add fruits, vegetables and meats in my language.
However, I’m unable to find any raw food (carrots, onions, …) in the existing catalogue.

I’ve tried searching through FAQ and the documentation, but couldn’t find an answer:

Am I allowed to add raw food to the database?
Thank you in advance!

Kind regards,
Momo.

2

Hey @FedoraUser and welcome to the community!

We do store everything that “has a barcode”, so if the raw food is packaged and has a barcode you can add it to the database.

Be aware that not every barcode is unique. Usually for locally packaged raw food (vegetables, fruit, etc…) the used barcode is not unique, and so you could find a different product on the website (or app) with the same barcode. If that’s the case, I’m afraid we have little to no support for it at the moment.

3

Hey @VaiTon !

Thank you for your reply.
Yeah, I was thinking more about generic items (without barcode).
But I see how it differs from your goal of inventorying products vs supporting calorie counting (which I’m focused on).
As it is not allowed, I’ll not pollute your database with it :wink:

I really do appreciate your fast and welcoming response, thank you for that! :blush:

Kind regards,
Momo.

4

I really do appreciate your fast and welcoming response, thank you for that! :blush:

You’re welcome! Also feel free to ask anything about the technical side of it in #technology!

But I see how it differs from your goal of inventorying products vs supporting calorie counting (which I’m focused on).

We do have a lot of re-users (like apps, etc…) that integrate their databases with our.

For the “raw” foods you could use some general DBs like

and for packaged products you could use OpenFoodFacts!

5

Thanks again!

I’ll do as you suggested :+1:

6

Some packaged raw food has nutritional values, so you might be able to use the statistics on the corresponding category to get nutritional values. Not sure whether this information is exposed through an api.

7

There are problems, e.g., to estimate the amount of fiber (now you maybe get a bad Nutri-Score, as OFF assumes 0 if the value is not given on the package), when not given on the package, where the raw food EFSA and USDA data can help.

So sooner or later, it is needed, when not in the main OFF database, then at least as a support database for calculations.

8

@FedoraUser I just wants to let you know that surely, raw Food is something we want to support in the future. One way would be to support searching items of CIqual or USDA.
The only problem is that we have to rethink a bit the format of the database (but we already have ideas on the best way to do it, we just have too much priority for the number of developers we currently are)
We had a first discussion on it here: CSV Upload from Open Source Data to OFF Database - PLU codes · Issue #7735 · openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server · GitHub

9

Thanks @alex and others!

I’ll keep an eye on the upcoming changes :wink:

And thank you all for the awesome and important work you’re doing here, it is highly appreciated.

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10

Perhaps not many because raw foods aren’t really classed as processed ?