Science-based, and helping Science
Science is one of the core pillars of Open Food Facts. Open Food Facts, from its creation in 2012, has relied on peer-reviewed scientific work to inform the public, like Nutri-Score and NOVA, and by making them available for a massive amount of people, across the world. We are also very happy and proud to see scientists reuse our data to push scientific knowledge forward. We love to engage with research teams to see what they can come up with, and how we can help them.
If you're using or considering using Open Food Facts as part of a science project, please let us know at contact@openfoodfacts.org

Meeting the EREN research team
We got to meet the EREN research team to better understand their scientific needs and the improvements they need in Open Food Facts.

Meeting Pr.Monteiro, the creator of NOVA
We got to meet Pr. Monteiro at Faculdade de Saúde Pública da USP, part of the team creating nutritional guidelines for Brazil, and creator of the NOVA groups on food processing.

Collaboration with the Liege University
The nutrition team of the Liege University is running a Scan Party in Belgium to constitute a database to support their research, and enable benchmark across countries.

Collaboration with the Mexico research team
The team of the Fundación Franco-Mexicana para la Medicina is running a massive Scan Party in Mexico to constitute a database to support their research, and enable benchmark across countries.

With the help of powerful tools & the Open Food Facts community
Open Food Facts has many tools to allow you creating data at large scale, using crowdsourcing.

Measurable scientific impact
Many publications use and cite Open Food Facts, both in nutrition and other research areas. Explore articles citing Open Food Facts on Google Scholar
A huge open crowdsourced database of food products, the Wikipedia of food
Since 2012, thousands of people from our international community have been contributing with product data, as well as updating it & improving its quality. Since 2019, we've also started using AI (machine learning) trained to recognise images, logos, and extract text from images to improve the database further.
-Based on science & serving science since 2012-
Open Food Facts has become a very useful resource for researchers worldwide who use our food data for some major studies on nutrition or the environment. State research teams have also benefited from this digital commons tool.
In addition to making raw product data freely available to all scientists worldwide, we structure and analyze the data to make it much more directly useful for their research. We also work directly with research teams to understand how we can answer their needs, and to make the results of their research instantly available to all other researchers.
Transparency accelerates scientific research and cooperation to gain new knowledge
Open Food Facts has been cited as a source in over 600 scientific papers (over 500 on Google Scholar). Science being one of our pillars, Open Food Facts also uses peer-reviewed scientific research to inform the public, such as the Nutri-Score and NOVA group, and makes it accessible to a very large number of people worldwide.
"Given the major public health challenges linked to nutrition that we are facing today on a global scale, it is essential to promote the consumption of a diet that is more conducive to good health. In this context, a digital database containing information on the various health aspects of food (nutritional composition, degree of processing, additives, etc.) is an essential tool for public health research and action."Professor Serge Hercberg - creator of the Nutri-Score
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