Science is one of the foundational pillars of Open Food Facts. Since 2012, we have turned peer-reviewed nutritional and environmental research into accessible public tools, while providing the world's scientific community with an open digital commons to advance public health.
How Open Food Facts connects academic rigor, crowdsourced data, and open science.
We do not invent proprietary scores. We strictly implement official, peer-reviewed public health metrics: Nutri-Score (EREN / Inserm), NOVA food processing classification (Prof. Carlos Monteiro, USP), and Eco-Score / Green-Score (ADEME Agribalyse), making complex science understandable in grocery store aisles.
Our open-source platform combines citizen crowdsourcing with optical character recognition (OCR), neural vision networks, and natural language processing to extract, structure, and validate nutritional declarations, ingredient lists, and additives on millions of products.
All collected product data and computed indicators are redistributed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Researchers worldwide enjoy barrier-free, permanent access to high-fidelity food data without paywalls, commercial restrictions, or vendor lock-in.
Partnering with world-renowned epidemiological institutes, public health agencies, and academic labs.
We met and collaborated with the EREN research team (Inserm / INRAE / CNAM / Université Sorbonne Paris Nord) led by Prof. Serge Hercberg and Dr. Chantal Julia, aligning data taxonomies and validating automated Nutri-Score calculation algorithms.
We met with Prof. Carlos Monteiro at the Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, the pioneer of dietary guidelines based on food processing and creator of the four NOVA ultra-processed food groups.
The clinical nutrition department at the University of Liège organized large-scale student Scan Parties in Belgian supermarkets, building a comprehensive national food dataset to support comparative nutrition benchmarks across Europe.
The Fundación Franco-Mexicana para la Medicina spearheaded nationwide Scan Parties across Mexico to map industrial reformulation, evaluate front-of-pack warning octagons, and enable international nutritional comparisons.
Open Food Facts equips research teams with self-service tools, specialized mobile scanning modes, and barcode campaign dashboards, allowing academic labs to build representative food brand samples rapidly at near-zero expense.
Open Food Facts data is actively cited and analyzed in hundreds of peer-reviewed journals, including The Lancet, BMJ, Nature Food, and Nutrients, spanning nutritional epidemiology, artificial intelligence, and environmental life cycle analysis.
"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."
The Wikipedia of food: turning messy real-world packaging into structured research infrastructure.
Open Food Facts organizes multi-country packaging data with standardized taxonomies for food categories, ingredients, allergens, food additives (E-numbers), nutrient reference values, and recycling instructions across 150+ countries.
Beyond clinical nutrition, our database powers breakthroughs in computer science (optical character recognition, multimodal vision-language models), behavioral economics (supermarket nudge studies), and food sustainability (greenhouse gas footprints).
Scientific credibility demands reproducibility. Because Open Food Facts archives historic snapshots and open calculation source code, researchers can replicate findings, benchmark algorithms, and publish open datasets without commercial secrecy.
Everything you need to incorporate Open Food Facts into your lab's next research project.
Download daily database dumps in JSONL, CSV, MongoDB, and Parquet formats for big-data and statistical analyses in Python, R, or Julia.
Query live product data with our free REST API and official client libraries for Python (openfoodfacts-python), R, Dart, and JavaScript.
Browse 138+ academic articles categorized by research themes: Nutrition, NOVA & UPF, Additives, AI & Vision, and Environment.
Explore our community science guide with best practices for handling missing nutrients, deduplication, and geographic filtering.
Ensure proper attribution under the Open Database License (ODbL) by referencing the database snapshot date.
@misc{openfoodfacts_database,
author = {{Open Food Facts}},
title = {Open Food Facts: A Free, Collaborative Global Food Database},
year = {2025},
url = {https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data},
note = {Open Database License (ODbL)}
}