Global additives taxonomy

How it works

This page contains the definition of the hierarchy of categories used in Open Food Facts.

The definition contains:

• stopwords (words that can be ignored when matching category names)
• word synonyms (words that can be exchanged when matching category names)
• category synonyms (the synonyms are then matched also in other category names that contains those synonyms)

For more details, see Global taxonomies

Current status

• Already live.
• Last push to production:

Done

• 2014/11/14 - Merge from http://fr.wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Liste_des_additifs_reconnus and http://en.wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Additives_taxonomy
• 2015 - * Match with Wikidata and Wikipedia at http://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/?mode=catalog&catalog=24&offset=0&show_noq=1&show_autoq=0&show_userq=0&show_na=0

Issues

• The French list treated all variants (i), (ii) etc. as one single additive entry.
• The other list Additives taxonomy does the reverse: there is one entry for each variant (e.g. E101(i) ) but no entry for E101.

To do

• Change the "EXXX Food Additive" to the correct name (at least in English)
  • Those are the additives that existed in the French list but not in the global list

• Add more synonyms for each language other than French (synonyms can be found in the EU directives)
• Then remove the English synonyms from the the French entries

• There are some synonyms in (parenthesis) for some entries, they should be converted to a comma separated list. But all parenthesis are not synonyms, so be careful.

Properties to be added

vegetarian_level:
gmo_level:
risk_level:
family:
description:fr:
origin:fr:
risks:fr:
from_palm_oil:
efsa_authorized:
fda_authorized:
jecfa_authorized:
fsanz_authorized:

yes/no/unsure

Ruling bodies

• Joint Food and Agricultural Organization/World Health Organization Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA)
• European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)
• FSANZ
• US FDA

Taxonomy definition

The taxonomy is now managed directly on GitHub: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/blob/master/taxonomies/additives.txt

Get in touch

Slack channel #additives