Contribute to Open Food Facts

All you need is a scan-do attitude! :-)

Can we make the food industry more open and transparent? Yes we scan! 1863 Open Food Facts contributors and growing - Since 2012
Yes we scan!

Everyone can contribute

Be part of our collaborative, free and open database of food products from around the world!

Open Food Facts is a non-profit project made entirely by volunteers, we do need you.

Add products

Use our Android, iPhone or Windows Phone app to easily scan the barcode of products from your home or local stores and upload pictures of their label.

No smartphone? No problem: you can also use your camera to add products directly on the web site.

Complete products

We need to categorize products and extract ingredients lists and nutrition facts to analyze their nutritional quality, determine if they are suitable for vegans and vegetatarians and much more!

You can help us complete products by selecting and cropping photos and filling in information.

Tell the world

Do you like Open Food Facts? Tell others about it!

You can present the project to your family and friends, show them how to install the app and contribute, write a blog post, and share Open Food Facts on social media.

Make it local

You can help translate the site and mobile app in your language, and to translate presentations, announcements etc.

Start or join a local contributors community: add local products, recruit friends, present the project in local meetups and conferences etc.


Expert help needed

Developing Open Food Facts also requires specialized knowledge and expertise in many different areas:

  • Project management

    We have tons of ideas and you probably have even more, but it is quite a challenge to prioritize them, to build a roadmap, and to manage projects when every participant is a volunteer with often limited time available.

  • Design

    We need help to build a better user experience on the Open Food Facts web site and mobile app, to improve their design, to create impactful presentation materials etc.

  • Development

    We have a lot of development work to do: on the Open Food Facts backend (Perl and MongoDB), API (JSON), web site (HTML5, JS, Foundation), iOS / Android / Windows Phone apps (a Java/Kotlin version on Android, and an hybrid version on iOS currently developed in HTML and JS with Apache Cordova / Phonegap for iOS, with a Swift version that needs volunteers), to build new cool reuses etc. We have projects in many programming languages to ensure anyone can reuse and contribute to Open Food Facts, in any language. We also have a growing Artificial Intelligence effort to simplify contribution work. Our code is on GitHub.

  • Community building

    We need to build local communities in all countries and at the same time unite them globally.

    It is very difficult to bootstrap a local community in a country without living there, so your help to find the first very motivated participants is essential. Are you one of them?

  • Communication

    We are not sure what to write here, could you help?

    More seriously, there are lot of cool things that users, contributors and reusers do with Open Food Facts, it would be great to get more people to know about it. In particular, we need help for public and media relations.

  • Special projects

    There are lots of interesting and original applications of food open data that we could work on with government food agencies, food producers, researchers, universities, schools, NGOs etc. Maybe you already have ideas? If you do, please help us to push them forward.


Let's talk!

A lot of ideas, energy and enthusiasm are shared in our contributors community, join us!

Here are some places where you can meet other contributors, talk to them and work with them:

  • Slack

    Slack is the best way to interact and collaborate with other contributors, developers and reusers. It's a discussion forum you can access from your browser or your phone. It completely changed how we work together. Please try it, click on the button below to get invited to our Slack.

  • Facebook groups

    We have Facebook groups for Open Food Facts contributors in many languages. Joining them is a good way to get news about the project and to share announcements to a wider audience.

  • Wiki

    We also have a wiki that we use to collaboratively document Open Food Facts and its sub-projects. We also use the wiki to manage translations and to work on the taxonomies / hierarchies of categories, labels etc.


There are many more ways to contribute to Open Food Facts, please join us on Slack and let's start the discussion!