Open Food Facts: How the Free Food Database Works

Open Food Facts is a free, crowdsourced database of packaged foods, run by a non-profit and filled in by volunteers who scan barcodes and photograph labels. It now lists more than 4 million products from 150 countries, grades them with Nutri-Score, NOVA and the Green-Score, and publishes everything as open data that any app or researcher can reuse.

Who is behind it

The project began in 2012, started by Stéphane Gigandet, and others joined quickly. A non-profit organization was set up to support it in 2014. For years it ran almost entirely on volunteer effort; Gigandet and a colleague went full time in 2019, and the project says its permanent team has since grown to around seven people.

Money comes from several directions. Open Food Facts names Santé publique France, the French public health agency, as its first sponsor, and lists individual donations and philanthropic and institutional partners as current support. The same team runs sister databases built the same way: Open Beauty Facts for cosmetics, Open Pet Food Facts, Open Products Facts for everything else, and Open Prices for grocery prices.

How a product gets in

Every entry starts with a barcode. A contributor scans it with the app, then photographs the front of the pack, the ingredient list and the nutrition table. Those photos are then turned into structured fields: ingredients, allergens, additives, labels, categories and nutrients. The photos stay attached to the product page, so anyone can compare the record against the actual package and fix a mistake. Manufacturers have their own route in as well, through a platform called Open Food Facts for Producers.

That approach explains both the scale and the gaps. More than 100,000 contributors have added products, according to the project, and the US edition of the site listed roughly 990,000 products in October 2026. Coverage depends on who has scanned what, so completeness varies from one product page to the next.

The three scores it calculates

Open Food Facts computes its grades itself, from the ingredient and nutrition data in each product record.

Score	What it measures	Scale	Where it comes from
Nutri-Score	Overall nutritional quality	A to E	Developed by the French research team EREN, based on a UK Food Standards Agency model
NOVA	Degree of processing	Groups 1 to 4	Classification proposed by Carlos Monteiro and colleagues
Green-Score	Environmental impact	Letter grade	Life cycle data from France’s Agribalyse database, plus adjustments

Nutri-Score. Points against a product come from energy, saturated fat, sugars and sodium; points in its favor come from fruit, vegetables and nuts, certain oils, fiber and protein. Because printing it is voluntary and limited to some countries, Open Food Facts has calculated it for every product in its database since 2014, which is why American items carry one.

NOVA. The four groups run from unprocessed or minimally processed foods to ultra-processed food and drink products. Open Food Facts assigns a group by looking for telltale ingredients, such as colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and maltodextrin, and categories such as sodas and candies. It calls the method “still experimental,” and a product without an ingredient list gets no NOVA group at all.

Green-Score. This is the new name, since the end of 2024, for what used to be the Eco-Score. It starts from a life cycle assessment of the product’s category, then adds bonuses for certifications like organic or fair trade and penalties for things like palm oil and hard-to-recycle packaging. For now the site shows it for more than 750,000 products sold in France, with other countries to follow once a suitable calculation exists.

Using the app

The Open Food Facts app is free on the App Store and on Android, including the open-source F-Droid store. Scan a barcode and it shows the Nutri-Score, NOVA group and environmental grade, along with allergen alerts and a match against food preferences you set. You can also add a missing product or a price on the spot. The same app reaches beyond the kitchen, scanning cosmetics, pet food and other products through the sister databases.

On privacy, the App Store label says the data the app collects, limited to product interactions and crash reports, is not linked to your identity.

Reusing the data

This is what makes Open Food Facts unusual. The database is licensed under the Open Database License, individual contents under the Database Contents License, and product photos under Creative Commons BY-SA. Full exports are regenerated every night in several formats, including JSONL, CSV, a MongoDB dump and a simplified Parquet file hosted on Hugging Face, with daily files covering recent changes.

There are rules. The live API is meant for real-world use, summed up in the project’s own guideline that one API call should equal one real scan by a user; bulk scraping is likely to be blocked, and heavy users are pointed to the exports instead. Software kits exist for many programming languages, and developers are asked to identify their app in a request header so the team can reach them if something breaks. Anyone publishing a reuse must credit Open Food Facts, link to the license and share adapted versions under the same terms, and the project asks reusers to send corrections back.

Where it falls short

A crowdsourced database is only as good as its most recent contributor. Ingredient lists and nutrition panels change, and Open Food Facts itself notes that its scores depend on how complete each product’s data is. The Green-Score is still France-focused, and the NOVA assignment is an algorithm working from ingredient text, not a lab test. Treat the grades as a quick screen, then read the label.

Bottom line

If you want a food scanner that costs nothing and publishes how every grade is worked out, Open Food Facts is the natural place to start. For how it compares with commercial scanners, see Apps Like Yuka, and for this year’s editorial awards in the category, visit Best Food Scanner Apps of 2026.