I just stumbled upon a product which has at least two different regional variants, produced by different manufacturers and having different ingredients and nutritional stats. But the packaging is 99% identical and apparently they share the same EAN-13 code.
How do I handle that?
This is the product page:
The most recent photos uploaded in 2025-11-12 show “Liecken Brot- und Backwagen GmbH” in DE-49681 Garrel as the manufacturer on the packaging:
But I bought a pack of this product today (2026-01-31), best before date 2026-02-12, and it has a different manufacturer “Brotland GmbH” in D-22859 Schenefeld on it, as well as different ingredients and so on:
It is not a case of the brand switching to a new manufacturer and terminating the contract with the old one. You can also see the manufacturer being very variable in the older product photos.
Instead they seem to produce this product at multiple factories with slightly different recipes, resulting in different ingredients and therefore also different nutritional stats.
Do we have a way to tag multiple coexisting product variants?
The problem is even greater for products with 8-digit EANs. There exists completely different foods with completely different ingredients and nutritional values.
For example, Lidl in France sold salad under an EAN that Aldi in Germany also uses for bacon. In the same entry, bacon is listed as vegan in the database and the salad is given the nutritional values of bacon. Or there is an edit war between different people who do not understand that they are editing two different products.
Technically, it would be easy to split an EAN between two or more products, so that you can fill in either one table or the other.
This would also be helpful for mixed packs containing, for example, three different types of sausage (with three different ingredients and nutritional values).
But OpenFoodFacts seems to prefer to ignore the problem and accept a total mess in the database.
And it has been demonstrated time and again that there is an urgent need for a way to post text or comments directly to specific products or to leave a message for another editor (as is standard practice on Wikipedia with the discussion page for each individual article).
