FoodRepo: An Open Food Repository of Barcoded Food Products

TL;DR

FoodRepo is an open, API-accessible database of over 21,000 Swiss food products with barcodes, ingredients, and nutritional info, supporting digital nutrition research and health studies.

Contribution

It provides the first open, programmatically accessible food product database with comprehensive coverage and open licensing for research and commercial use.

Findings

Over 21,000 items in the database

Open API facilitates data access and reuse

Supports large-scale digital nutrition studies

Abstract

In the past decade, digital technologies have started to profoundly influence healthcare systems. Digital self-tracking has facilitated more precise epidemiological studies, and in the field of nutritional epidemiology, mobile apps have the potential to alleviate a significant part of the journaling burden by, for example, allowing users to record their food intake via a simple scan of packaged products barcodes. Such studies thus rely on databases of commercialized products, their barcodes, ingredients, and nutritional values, which are not yet openly available with sufficient geographical and product coverage. In this paper, we present FoodRepo (https://www.foodrepo.org), an open food repository of barcoded food items, whose database is programmatically accessible through an application programming interface (API). Furthermore, an open source license gives the appropriate rights to anyone to share and reuse FoodRepo data, including for commercial purposes. With currently more than 21,000 items available on the Swiss market, our database represents a solid starting point for large-scale studies in the field of digital nutrition, with the aim to lead to a better understanding of the intricate connections between diets and health in general, and metabolic disorders in particular.