Brands

This is the brands of the product. The main brand, generally clearly displayed on the front pack, should be entered first. A product can have other brands:

• when a product is a brand sold by a big company: Actimel is sold by Danone, see https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/4009700036810/actimel-granatapfel
• when a product is sold with its brand translated in two languages:
  • Nature Valley is sometimes written Val Nature; see https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/0065633280267/barre-granola-erable-et-cassonade-nature-valley
  • No Name is also written Sans nom; represent 100+ products for No Name and 170+ products for Sans Nom.

When a product has more than one brand, the first brand in the field is taken as the main brand.

There's no taxonomy for brands for the moment, so just do your best and don't waste too much time to enter brands.

Data issues

Some brands are difficult to read:

• is it Coop, coop, COOP, CO OP?

Some brands can be related to different companies in different countries:

• San Miguel
• Star
• Walkers seems to represent 3 different brands (1, 2 and 3)

Some brands are related to a common name or an ingredient, which can be confusing:

• Racines (means "roots" in French)
• La Truffe (means "the truffle" in French)
• Pure Protein
• Best Choice is a brand, not a tagline
• Great Value also
• The Belgian, often entered Belgian; it produces many false positive from our AI.

Brands containing an apostrophe are often missing this one:

• Lay's often written Lays
• Kellogg's often written Kelloggs or something else
• Sar'Ocean.

Brands are changing sometimes. How to deal with that?

Some particular cases for a brand

• A brand can contain only numbers, such as 1664, 1883 or 365.
• A brand can contain quotes, such as The Muffin "Mam" Inc
• A brand can contain &, such as M&M's
• A brand can contain commas, such as Williams, West & Witt's Products; https://world.openfoodfacts.org/brand/williams-west-witt-s-prods
• A brand can have a sub-brand containing its own name: Sainsbury's use a brand called By Sainsbury's.

Some particular cases for a product

• A product can have more than 2 brands; eg:
  • Coop, in Switzerland, can add up to three brands on a product: Betty Bossi, Karma and Coop in this product; they justify it: "We offer a wide range of own-label brands and brand worlds." (source)
  • In this product, Lipton belongs to Unilever but this product is distributed by Pepsico

Implementation in Open Food Facts

In the database, this field is called brands.

See issues related to brands.

Preventing OFF AI to detect some false brands: see brand_taxonomy_blacklist.txt.

Help to collect brands

The IA of Open Food Facts, called Robotoff, is trying to identify brands. The annotations made by Robotoff are provided to users, asking them to answer to a simple question. There are also used by Hunger Game. Everyone can use Hunger Game, but be careful to the issues mentioned in this current page.

• on 2020-10-29, there were 43200 annotations and 22748 resting
• on 2020-11-17, there were 46911 annotations and 22720 resting

Taxonomy encoding

An overview of the encoding used in the brands taxonomy:

• blocks/white lines - a single brand is defined by a block of text and are separated by white lines;
• definition - a single line defines the brand in a specific language, an attribute, etc. Each line starts with a name followed by parameters and separated by a colon
• parameters:
  • key (zz:) - required for brands with the same name
  • language (e.g. en:) - the brand-name in the language en. A brand might be defined in multiple languages as needed, with a single line for each language
  • default (xx:) - a value to be used for any language that is not listed;
  • parent (<zz:) - a reference to another (parent) brands that encompasses the the brand. Can also be used for product lines;
  • attributes - to be defined (owner, country distributor, wikipage, …)
• order - start with the parent; follow by the key; the english value, the default, followed by the other languages in ISO-order