Open Food Facts

The open, collaborative food database that feeds a good part of the web: how it works, and how it differs from an app like Yuka.

› 1. What is Open Food Facts?

Open Food Facts is a worldwide food database, free, open and collaborative, on the same principle as Wikipedia for general knowledge or OpenStreetMap for maps. Founded in 2012 by Stéphane Gigandet, it now lists several million products, contributed by tens of thousands of volunteers around the world.

It is a non-profit, funded by donations. It sells nothing, has no commercial partnership with brands, and publishes all its data under an open licence (the Open Database License): anyone can consult, download and reuse it free of charge, including commercially.

ℹ️ It is precisely that openness that lets sites like vraifood.com, and dozens of other apps, build on the same underlying data rather than re-entering everything by hand.

› 2. How the data is built

In practice, contributors photograph packaging in stores (front of pack, nutrition table, ingredient list, barcode) and send it in through the mobile app or the site. Those photos are then turned into structured data, partly automatically through character recognition, partly by hand by the community.

From that raw data, Open Food Facts computes indicators that follow public, documented formulas, defined by bodies outside the association:

Nutri-Score: the official nutritional rating (calculated using the Santé publique France method).
NOVA: the degree of processing, from 1 (unprocessed) to 4 (ultra-processed).
Eco-Score: an environmental impact indicator.

Nothing is hidden: every source photo stays viewable on the product page, and the edit history is public. If a figure looks doubtful, you can always trace it back to the original label.

› 3. Open Food Facts vs Yuka

The two were born in the same spirit: Yuka in fact built on Open Food Facts data in its early days. But in January 2018, Yuka cut that link to build its own database, partly through user submissions and partly through direct partnerships with brands. Since then they have been two quite distinct models:

Open Food Facts

Non-profit association, funded by donations
Data 100% open and reusable by anyone
Gives no in-house score: it displays public indicators (Nutri-Score, NOVA, Eco-Score) computed from formulas documented by third parties
No commercial partnership with brands

Yuka

A commercial company, with a paid tier ("Yuka Black")
Proprietary database since 2018, fed partly through brand partnerships
Gives a single proprietary score: 60% nutritional quality (based on the Nutri-Score), 30% additives, 10% organic status
The exact calculation for additives is not made public

💡 There is no hidden conflict of interest or dishonesty on either side: these are simply two different logics, one an "open data infrastructure", the other a "consumer product with a verdict boiled down to one score".

› 4. Which to use, and what for?

The two complement each other more than they compete. Yuka is handy in the aisle for a quick verdict from scanning a barcode, without having to read the nutrition table. Open Food Facts is more useful when you want to understand why a product is rated as it is, compare several indicators side by side, or check one precise figure (sugar content, additive list) without depending on a single score that rolls everything into one number.

That second logic is the one we favour on vraifood.com: show the raw numbers rather than a ready-made verdict, so that you are the one judging what matters to you.

🔗 To look up a product page directly: fr.openfoodfacts.org