News

This page is a test to understand what news we should announce. Maybe it could lead to build a newsletter.

For the moment, we just log some interesting news lost in the Slack space or elsewhere.

• Each entry shouldn't be longer than three to five lines of text. Even better if it fits under 280 chars (twitter limit).
• Links are good.
• Proposed format: Date - Topic: announcement.

2023-05

• 2023-05-23 - Join our monthly meet-up about the Internationalisation of the project on the 23rd of May at 6 pm (CET).
• 2023-05-22 - We have completed the second phase (creativity) of our project to decide the future of the mobile application and have a pretty dashboard. The First meeting for the third phase is happening 22st of may at 6 pm (CET)
• 2023-05-17 - Let's imagine together the future of our mobile app. Join the idea-generating live session #3 🧠 this Wednesday from 18-19h (CET Europe/Paris timezone) via this link: https://meet.google.com/zjt-mscm-dbg (you can also add the event from our Community calendar to your own calendar to not miss it 😉 ). Everyone is welcome, even if you didn't come to previous sessions.
• 2023-05-09 - 🗞️ Discover the new set of tools in our latest newsletter for professionals: our guide, tutorials, exchange sessions (French, English, German) - We're here to help you make the most of your platform.
• 2023-05-02 - OW2con'23 official program was published and will feature a talk about Open Food Facts on 2023-06-14 16:30 (CET)
• 2023-05-02 - 🗣📱Join the conversation about how to create a more impactful mobile app : the 2nd creative meeting is on the 2nd of May at 18-19h CET: we'll organise the ideas from last week's brainstorm (note: you are welcome to join even if you were not there), give positive & negative criticism on the assembled ideas & to add a few more ideas, if time allows. You can also add your ideas on the forum post ahead of the meeting (they'll be added to the Excalidraw board used in the call). Link to call: https://meet.google.com/hkx-yvux-dfg

2023-04

• 2023-04-26 - Our monthly 👋 Welcome & 💡Open Class community call on the 26th April from 6-7 pm CET (GMT+1): whether you're new or not, come hang out with us. The second part of the hour will be a tutorial by Alex on the Packaging operation & ways to tackle food packaging data !
• 2023-04-10 - The community needs you 🧠 ! We are inviting you to help us build TOGETHER a vision for the Open Food Facts app & collectively decide how we should try to reach this goal. What should Open Food Facts app — or even apps — look like to reach a maximum of people? Head to our forum where you will find the detailed process & calendar : https://bit.ly/3nVg3Um . Let's make it App'n 😉📲 !
• 2023-04-04 - We're launching the very first Workshop for Producers! 💬 Every other Tuesday at 2 pm in French, and 3 pm in English CET (GMT+1) Join us for an open discussion about your use of the Pro platform: we're here to better understand your needs and answer your questions.

2023-03

• 2023-03-29 - Join us for a new "👋 Welcome & 💡Open Class" community call on the 29th March at 6-7 pm CET (GMT+1), 30 minutes to connect as a community & 30 minutes tutorial (this one will be on how the volunteer teams work) ! Link to call https://meet.google.com/quy-dnom-xxc / or compose: ‪(FR) +33 1 87 40 15 56‬ CODE : ‪236 602 380‬# / for more phone numbers : https://tel.meet/quy-dnom-xxc?pin=7271571147009 .
• 2023-03-28 - 👀 Check out our latest blog article: a lovely testimony from the App myLabel, reusing and contributing to the Open Food Facts database since 2019.
• 2023-03-25 - 🤳🥫 In Paris this upcoming weekend ? Join a scan party around food packaging this Saturday 25th of March from 2-5 pm at a 400 Coop supermarket, at 65 Boulevard de Charonne, 75011 Paris.
• 2023-03-08 - Thanks to the Perl Foundation, Open Food Facts is participating again in Outreachy (an open source internship program to promote diversity), with a project to improve the Producers Platform.
• 2023-03-08 - 🗞️ Check out our first edition of the newsletter for professionals: we tell you about the latest news of the Pro platform (French, English, German)
• 2023-03-07 - The pro platform gets a new look! 😎 Discover the top features and updates in this blog article. Interested to join the food transparency movement? Contact us: producers@openfoodfacts.org
• 2023-03-04 - Open Food Facts will be present at the Salon de l'Agriculture 2023 🥬🐮 in Paris (Porte de Versailles) on the stand of ADEME (Hall 4, B 155); a workshop will be held in the afternoon on food packaging (with our joint project "Tackling Packaging" / Plein pot sur les emballages). We'd be delighted to see you if you are at the exhibition!

2023-02

• 2023-02-24 - we started an infrastructure operation to upgrade some of our production server. We reinstall one of the server, meanwhile the MongoDB instanced has been temporarily moved to a virtual server kindly hosted by Open Street Map France. If you see particular issues those month, report them, also thank you in advance for your patience.
• 2023-02-16 - Pierre Slamich and Manon Corneille attended the conference “Towards a harmonised ecolabel in Europe” in The Hague 🇳🇱 Check out their key takeaways in this blog article!
• 2023-02-07 - The monthly data quality meeting is taking place every first Monday of the month, at 6 PM CET (see public calendar). You can have a look to meeting notes. Join #quality-data on our Slack space if you want to join the effort!
• 2023-02-05 - Open Food Facts will participate in a round table at digital transition and food transition (fr) organized by Strasbourg University (France).
• 2023-02-03 - Open Food Facts will present the project "Plein pot sur les emballages" to a professional audience in a webinar organised by the organisation ILEC

2023-01

• 2023-01-30 - ADEME has published a very interesting FAQ (in french) about environmental display on food products. Find it in this page (french).
• 2023-01-30 - Do you want to learn more about our food packaging operation? I'm a citizen 🙋‍♀️ / I'm a producer 🏭 / I'm a journalist 🗞️
• 2023-01-25 - Open Food Facts will be at the International Green Week (an international exhibition of the food, agriculture and gardening industries) in Berlin from 25-27th January. A summary of our experience here
• 2023-01-23 - We are hiring a mobile developer !
• 2023-01-16 - Very excited to welcome Sarazine Ouattara in the team as an intern for the next 6 months. She will be onboarding producers in our Pro platform and working to develop new partnerships internationally.
• 2023-01-12 - 🤳🥫 Launch of the food packaging operation "Plein pot sur les emballages" at the Académie du Climat (Paris) with press conference, followed by a citizen workshop. You can watch the presentations & roundtable on our Youtube channel (French only). Read more about this project in this blogpost and join the effort !
• 2023-01-08 - Open Food Facts is now on Let's Act!, a German platform connecting inspired volunteers with non-profits aiming for positive social & environmental impact.
• 2023-01-03 - The monthly data quality meeting is taking place every first monday of the month, at 6 PM CET (see public calendar). You can have a look to meeting notes. Join #quality-data on our Slack space if you want to join the effort!

2022-12

• 2022-12-19 - As part of our latest operation "Plein pot sur les emballages", we invite all food producers to share their data on packaging: number, shape, material, recyclability, weight... We want it all! More detail (FR only)
• 2022-12-16 - Open Food Facts did a small presentation during les entretiens du nouveau monde industriel conference in Paris, during a round table about alimentation and knowledge modeling. Video (in french) is here.
• 2022-12-14 - Save the date: our Operation "Plein pot sur les emballages" (food packaging data collection), in partnership with the ADEME (the French Agency for Ecological Transition), will be launched on the 12th January at the Académie du Climat, in Paris, with a citizen collection workshop ("scan party"🤳🥫 - 2 hrs). To participate, please register : Event page & Facebook event page.
• 2022-12-12 - Want to meet face-to-face? Don't miss this occasion then: our “Welcome & Tutorial” community monthly meet-up will be this Thursday 15th December from 18-19h CEST time. On the program: 👋 30 minutes of connecting as a community, followed by 👨‍🏫 30 minutes of tutorial on Data Quality tools (by Charles). Link to call: meet.google.com/qcc-gkea-mqa. Feel free to join either/or/both as your schedule allows it. See you there !
• 2022-12-10 - Join the monthly meeting about Internationalisation on Wed 14th of Nov at 18:00 (CET). See public events calendar. Next one will be held on Jan the 18th.
• 2022-12-08 - 📝 Two new insightful articles on our Blog: Presenting Open Food Facts at Events (Capitole du Libre recap) & Using Open Food Facts as a Stock Tracking App in Germany (a testimonial from an app that reuses our database).
• 2022-12-06 - The latest version AGRIBALYSE 3.1 has been deployed in Open Food Facts. AGRIBALYSE provides references data on the environmental impacts of food products through a database built according to the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodology.
• 2022-12-05 - Taxonomy editor is deployed on staging (since Friday). This is still a draft, but you are welcome to try, and report bugs, blockers or propose enhancements.
• 2022-12-05 - Data quality monthly meetings will take the first Tuesday of each month. Next Data quality monthly meeting will then take place on Tuesday, December 6th at 6-7pm CEST online. You can check last meeting notes and the agenda.
• We released a new version of the app for iPhone. New features include: A count of your contributions to Open Food Facts, added Hunger Games as a DEV mode preview, improved choice between gallery/camera for photos, nutrition page improvements, easier list addition, UI fixes, portion calculator is back
• 2022-12-05 - Since the end of november, @stephane has introduced a new data quality facet: when energy in kcal does not matche the value computed from other nutrients. These facet is a huge improvement to detect data quality issues. We're going to improve it in the next few days, as it is still containing some false positive (eg. sweeteners).

2022-11

• 2022-11-30 - You can now subscribe to Data quality daily (beta), a daily email suggesting you 3 Open Food Facts products to fix. These products are sent to you (and no-one else), they should be fixable (photos) and ranked by products' popularity (your fixes have a higher impact). You also get nice daily stats about data quality, including a contributors board. Help us improve data quality!
• 2022-11-29 - As Open Food Facts reaches the middle of its fundraising season, we invite you to participate in the Giving Tuesday (29 November), a worldwide movement, unleashing the power of people and organisations to transform their communities and the world. It encourages and multiplies giving, commitment and solidarity. 🔎 🍊 Donate to Open Food Facts. Donations allow to finance the core of our activity & its sustainability. Read more on it in this dedicated blog post.
• 2022-11-25 - A warm thanks to everyone who took part in the Meat Alternative Challenge. Together, we’ve x 4 the number of products categorised as Meat Alternatives in the Netherlands. And you can do it too! We’ve documented the process so that it is easy for anyone to replicate. More infos in our blog (FR or EN)
• 2022-11-22 - Open Food Facts joined the yearly WWF Corporate Meet-ups - a great opportunity to talk about social responsibility issues with food corporates such as Carrefour, the Bel group, Sodexo and to participate in a workshop about sustainable food transition.  
• 2022-11-21 - Open Food Facts gives a lecture on Eco-Score to the students of Master CIPA (from design to industrialisation of food products) in Arras, in collaboration with Adrianor. The goal of this pedagogic workshop is to help students to develop innovative and environmentally friendly food products.
• 2022-11-11 - openfoodfacts-search is now live on staging environment: https://search.openfoodfacts.net/docs (off/off). This is a new API to help building better auto-completion and search tools by Simon Jenkins You are encouraged to test and eventually contribute new features or tools using it.
• 2022-11-07 - We are launching our annual donation campaign! Donations make it possible for Open Food Facts data to be accessible to all, free,  open and reusable for a bigger impact. ➡️ Why & How to donate? ⬅️
• 2022-11-04 - Watch this short piece on Open Food Facts by Loopsider. Don't forget to give it a like or comment as it helps the video become more visible ;)
• 2022-11-03 - Open Food Facts took part in the webinar "Estimate the carbon footprint of 140,000 food references" organised by TheGreenData, a company reusing Open Food Facts' database to develop a Greenhouse gases diagnostic for food products. Replay available here (Langage: FR)
• 2022-11-02 - Open Food Facts co-founder Pierre presented the project at the launch of Social Good Week organised by the Social Good Accelerator, which was initiated in 2012 by HelloAsso, to bring together the digital and non-profit ecosystems to encourage initiatives that place citizen innovation at the heart of their action. Among speakers were Benoît Hamon and Axelle Lemaire. Watch Pierre's pitch here (in FR).
• 2022-11-02 - Discover how Open Food Facts works in this 3 min video : the fruit of a collective work from Comcorp, Antidox, Google.org and our team. Enjoy watching :-)

2022-10

• 2022-10-26 - Open Food Facts is starting Monthly Webinars, every last Wednesday of the month, 18-19H (CEST). First one will be 26/10 "On contribution & the website" (Stéphane). An opportunity to connect & attend a tutorial on a specific contributing area. All dates will be available on the Community Calendar!
• 2022-10-25 - A complete redesign of the Open Food Facts website was launched a few days ago, with new logos and colors, knowledge panels, and updated personal search. The paint is still quite fresh and there are many small things that need to be fixed. Let us know if you see some issues, or if you want to help us fix them!
• 2022-10-24 - Join the new monthly meeting on Internationalisation. Wed 9th of Nov 18:00 (Paris time) will be our first one! See public events calendar
• 2022-10-2 - CSV export has been enriched, with 10 more fields exported: ingredients_analysis_tags, additives_tags, nutrient_levels_tags, product_quantity, owner, data_quality_errors_tags, unique_scans_n (la dernière année), popularity_tags, completeness, last_image_t
• 2022-10-21 - From October 21st to November 25th, we are launching a special operation in the Netherlands to collect data on alternatives to meat, in collaboratin with non-profit Harry Go Vert. Get your keyboards ready! #MeatAlternativeChallenge
• 2022-10-18 - On 18th and 19th October, we will be participating in the SIAL food trade in Paris. The main goal for Open Food Facts during these two days is to engage with international producers and retailers.
• 2022-10-17 - Want to volunteer with Open Food Facts/already a contributor? Sign up on the new volunteer form Contributor's Skill Pool. The "pool" allows us to do just that by having a volunteer base that we can activate easily.
• 2022-10-12 - On Hunger Games, our home-made contribution tool, you can now answer suggestions for categories that will trigger the addition of the eco-score. It's available here!
• 2022-10-12 - We started a discussion on the next version of the product edit API that will support new structured data for packagings. Please comment on the proposal.
• 2022-10-11 - #SaveTheDate Join an online meet-up to discuss together "How To Help Amplify Open Food Facts' Annual Donation Campaign" on the 21st October 2022 at 15-16h (CEST time zone). Link to call on the Open Food Facts' Public Events Calendar.
• 2022-10-10 - tomorrow Tuesday 11th October 18:00 (Paris time) will be our first monthly infrastructure meeting. See public events calendar
• 2022-10-05 - The famous chocolate drink brand Cacolac is now sharing its data automatically via the brand new AGENA3000 connector.
• 2022-10-04 - Our blog is now available in several new languages: German, Spanish, Italian, and a few more. Click here to check out our latest news!
• 2022-10-03 - Open Food Facts is launching a new project. The goal? Rethink the way we collect packaging information and carry out a special operation to collect packaging data for the TOP 10,000 most scanned products. This project is funded by Ademe.
• 2022-10-02 - Last weekend we had an inspiring edition of Open Food Facts Days 2022 with many European & French contributors, app re-users and a keynote speaker Dr. Chantal Julia (EREN). A blog article will give account on the event soon; for now, here's the group photo)

  

  Open Food Facts days 2022 group

2022-09

• 2022-09-26 - Open Food Facts Days 2022 are this weekend! Find all about the event on the wiki page here. For those participating remotely, links for the Youtube Live & CryptPad are coming soon!
• 2022-09-12 - New release of the app for Android and iOS - New features of the week: ⌾ Fixed barcode scan bug on all devices in specific conditions. Please keep reporting scan issues ⌾ Editing and sending images works offline ⌾ New photo gallery in edit mode ⌾ Open Food Facts shortcut for your notification panel ⌾ Fixes for small screens ⌾ If your phone does not scan, please try the new Profile >> Application Settings >> and enable "Alternate Mode for Scanner"
• 2022-09-16 - Open Source Day (OSD), an all-day hackathon (including workshops), will take place this Friday 16th. Open Food Facts will participate as a project in the context of the Grace Hopper Celebration. The goal of OSD is to promote Open Source contributions by women in tech. Read all about it on our wiki page.
• 2022-09-15 - Open Food Facts welcomes a new recruit this week: Raphael is a machine learning specialist and one of the biggest contributors to the project.
• 2022-09-05 - Registration for the Open Food Facts Days on the 1-2 October is on-going. Don't forget to register here if you would like to join us, as places are limited.
• 2022-09-05 - A new intern, Gabriel, is joining us for the next 6 months; he will be working on putting on a new model for embedding and a new library for approximate nearest neighbours methods for the robotoff-ann project, as well as bringing improvements to Robotoff by participating in the elaboration of new models.

2022-08

• 2022-08-29 - Raquel did finish her outreachy internship (funded by perl foundation) last friday. Thanks a lot Raquel for your contributions. You can also read her blog.
• 2022-08-20 - 2.5 million products on Open Food Facts! A huge thank you to our contributors from all over the world for adding new products daily, for checking, editing, updating data so it can be the most accurate & for spreading the word about our citizen project. A shout out to all the producers as well who share their product data with our project.
• 2022-08-18 - Check out the lastest version of the User Guide for the Pro Platform (FR or EN). This document, intended for producers, retailers and brands has been designed to help profesionals make the most out of the Pro platform.
• 2022-08-01 - Mini-grants are available to help with transport & accommodation costs for the Open Food Facts Days in October 2022. More information on the wiki page. Deadline for application: 15 August 2022.

2022-07

• 2022-07-25 - Open Food Facts will participate in Grace Hopper Celebration Open Source Day thanks to our intern Yukti. Open Source Day (OSD) is an all-day hackathon(including workshops), in which participants of all skill levels learn about Open Source while contributing to projects designed to solve real world problems. The goal of OSD is to promote Open Source contributions by women in tech.
• 2022-07-25 - Summer newsletter is here. Read online.
• 2022-07-25 - Upcoming OPEN FOOD FACTS DAYS: on the 1st-2nd October 2022 at the Académie du Climat in Paris! You can read about it on this blog post and sign up via these links (FR or ENG).
• 2022-07-18 - Phawinpon Chotwanvirat, a community member from Thailand will be presenting Open Food Facts in the Annual meeting of Thai Dietetics Association on Tuesday the 30th of August.
• 2022-07-13 - Among other imports, we imported the products of French retailer Casino Group (2700+ products). If you'd like to help with producer imports and/or relationship, send a mail to producers@openfoodfacts.org
• 2022-07-08 - Release of a new version of the mobile app in progress: Autocomplete is back in Edition mode, the local database is now compressed (and 6 times smaller on your phone), small visual fixes in dark mode.
• 2022-07-09 - Thanks to the invitation by Wikimédia France, we'll also be present at their WikiCamp 2022 in Dieppe.
• 2022-07-08 - Alex G. will attend and present the project at Les assises de la carbonomie, in Grenoble, a meeting among with some actors that have carbon tracking at the heart of their activity.
• 2022-07-04 - Release of the new version of the mobile app in progress: shortcuts to complete incomplete products; patches (at the welcome page, and in many places).
• 2022-07-04 - Bryan Han is joining us as an intern for 4 weeks to work on a Python module to parse the taxonomy source files (to be used in the taxonomy editor and other projects).

2022-06

• 2022-06-30 - Pierre S., project co-founder, is presenting the results of Afnic Foundation support to Open Food Facts for the facilitation of environmental choices in food.
• 2022-06-29 - Open Food Facts, represented by Alex G., is participating in the CivicTech Abidjan 2022 Forum. Thanks to CFI, the French media development agency, for giving us this opportunity, and to Samsa.fr for the excellent editorial and preparatory work.
• 2022-06-21 - Producers can now send photos and data automatically to our producers platform through AGENA3000
• 2022-06-18 - Open Food Facts presented its redesigned mobile app and project at the VivaTech 2022 innovation fair in Paris. See Blog post "3 things we took away from VivaTech 2022".
• 2022-06-15 - Demo day for Data For Good season #10, will happen on wednesday evening in Paris.. We will show what we did along the way to try to upgrade category prediction with a team of volunteers. See DataForGood-2022
• 2022-06-14 - French agri-food technical center Adrianor (Arras, France) is inviting Open Food Facts to give a conference about Eco-Score an discuss with an audience of producers.

2022-05

• 2022-05-25 - Thanks to the Perl and Raku Foundation, Open Food Facts is pleased to participate in the Outreachy programme which promotes diversity in the tech industry. This programme gives us the opportunity to welcome the contributions of two students: Yukti and Raquel, who will help us improve the quality of the main Open Food Facts engine.
• 2022-05-17 - Open Food Facts is participating in Google Summer Of Code 2022 and was pleased to see five projects selected! Five developers will spend their summer contributing to the project. Congratulations to Aadarsh Anantha Ramakrishnan, Sumit Kashyap, Aman Raj, Sumana Basu and Landon Pattison.
• 2022-05-17 - The GSoD 2022 kicks off with our selected candidate Funke. Congratulations!
• 2022-05-01 - Ongoing petition "Stop lobbies trying to distort Nutri-Score and prevent it from being mandatory".
• 2022-05-01 - Onboarding with Bayes Impact for a 3-month acceleration program
• 2022-05-01 - Applications for Season of Docs are still on-going: Open Food Facts SoD page - Open Food Facts budget -Have a complete OpenAPI compliant documentation for the Open Food Facts API - our current API doc repository
• 2022-05-01 - Newsletter on the visual identity change (French) (English blogpost, French blogpost)
• 2022-05-01 - We presented the half-season summary of Data 4 Good on the improved categorization of products

2022-04

• 2022-04-25 - Open Food Facts welcomes 2 new team members: Manon (international development manager) & Galia (community manager).
• 2022-04-25 - Opening applications for Season of Docs 2022.
• 2022-04-20 - Open Food Facts team meets with Wikimédia France.
• 2022-04-01 - two new user settings - allowing to ask for code bar display, directly on search results, along with a direct edit link.

2022-03

• 2022-03-28 - Mobile App - F-Droid release is underway. Open Beauty Facts got refreshed, and Open Food Facts, Open Products Facts and Open Pet Food Facts are underway.
• 2022-03-24 - Google Season of Docs - We applied to the Google Season of Docs to ensure we can dedicate time and resources for better documentation
• 2022-03-24 - Mobile App - The Classic Android app got a refresh this week, courtesy of Edouard, Vaiton, Naivekook, others, and many Android students, with many fixes for scanning, editing and contributing, as well as a new shortcut for Android Quick Settings Tiles.
• 2022-03-14 - New mobile app - A refresh of Smoothie, including Knowledge Panels has been released on Google Play and the App Store (You can install it on Android or iPhone/iPad.)
• 2022-03-14 - CSS freelancing opportunity - There is a CSS freelancing opportunity to revamp the website of Open Food Facts as part of the 10-year anniversary celebrations. You can see all the details here.
• 2022-03-14 - Wikidata - Pierre presented Open Food Facts as part of the Wikidata Reuse Week. You can see the slides and notes from the session here.
• 2022-03-14 - Data4Good - We're off to a new season! This time, it's about product categorization. The aim is to improve the categorization from Robotoff, by making it more resilient and able to leverage more data. You can watch the initial presentation by Pierre, join the #dataforgood-2022 on Slack, or contribute to the repository. Weekly meetings take place Wednesdays at 8PM (you can also ask Alex or Pierre to add you to the calendar reminder)
• 2022-03-07 - GSoC - After being selected in 2018, we’re once again happy to announce that we’re one of the open source organizations selected for the Google Summer of Code 2022  :-) - Find out more at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/organizations/open-food-facts
• 2022-03-07 - Infrastructure - We can make it official now, after some week of experiments, that we have a new mail server based on proxmox mail gateway for sending emails that implements all needed standards to avoid blacklisting. Thus password resets and other emails generated by apps should flow again to the users inboxes. See also technical documentation.

2022-02

• 2022-02-11 - Taxonomies - Thanks to @Stephane's work, the packaging field is now taxonomized, which means we won't have a mix of languages without knowing in which language each entry is. It is also very useful to compute the Eco-Score environmental score with more precision.
• 2022-02-11 - Finding technical contribution opportunities - Are you a Python person ? A designer. Do your eyes shine for Ruby or are you feeling Rusty ? Thanks to @Pierre (teolemon), There's now a recap of all the technical projects of Open Food Facts, along with shortcuts to technical contribution opportunities. Feel free to propose improvements to the recap itself!
• 2022-02-11 - SDKs (Ruby) - New release of our Ruby package thanks to @nicolasleger
• 2022-02-07 - New Robotoff version in production ! (see v1.2.0 on GitHub): Thanks to the work of @Yana K during the fellowship, categories predicted with a very high level of confidence are now applied automatically. In addition, some foundational work by Raphael to split predictions and insights should pave the way for more detections in the future. Thanks @Alex G for the final touches and the smooth release !

2022-01

• 2022-01-17 - Recruitments - Open Food Facts is recruiting 3 positions: a front-end dev (fr), a community manager (fr) and an international operation manager (fr).
• 2022-01-01 - Happy New Year everyone - Open Food Facts will be 10 this year, and we'll try to celebrate accordingly.
• 2022-01-04 - Folksonomy Engine/DART - Support for the Folksonomy Engine has landed in the Open Food Facts DART package, courtesy of Monsieur Tanuki. If you're creating a Flutter app, you can learn more on GitHub

2021-12

• 2021-12-30 - Smoothie - Flutter - We're making steady progress, with a new UI, speed improvements, and a completely new scan card and product page. Links to test it
• 2021-12-26 - Hunger Games - New languages deployed with partial or full translations: Estonian, Croatian, Corean, Bulgarian and Polish. Try it - Contribute Translations

2021-09

• 2021-09-30 - Launch of the Quick wins vote, a test to let all the community choose its preferred issues. Don't hesitate to participate!
• 2021-09-27 - Google Fellowship - Fellows' impact kept accelerating:
  • Robotoff- On the ML front, Yana closed the 8 month gap in releasing Robotoff, after extensive refactoring. As a result, Weight, Label and Store extraction are working again, but it's only the tip of much more significant improvements, with more to come as she has begun taking category prediction to the next level.
  • Robotoff- Building on Yana's work, and after automating Product Opener, Olivier has started automating the deployment of Robotoff, this will mean more reliable and faster releases of new features, and no more 8 month deployment gap.
  • Environment - Eco-Score
    • Eco-Score - improvements to the packaging and origins taxonomies (Pierre) should mean more accurate computations in more languages.
    • Environment - Martin's estimation work proved fruitful, and he has an initial prototype that should enable us to refine environmental impact based on the ingredients.
  • Survey - We have deployed the feature survey widely on the apps, and already got a ton of useful feedback. Thanks to Ako and Melanie as well as Eloïse, Barth, Seb and many others for the work on this
  • Smoothie - Flutter - We released the initial version of Smoothie on Android and iPhone, making the "Personal Search" and "Personal Scan" features available for the first time on mobile. Work by all the Flutter team (fellows Jasmeet, Slava, Allie, Darren, Greg, Hans, Justin and Kate as well as Marvin and Monsieur Tanuki) is already visible in the release, and even more massive improvements are coming soon. This includes a redesigned navigation, search, scan, and soon product page. Releases for iOS and Android were automated by Pierre, Marvin and Philippe, and will mean fast releases of new features on both platforms.
  • UI/UX - the Product and UI team (fellows Cal and Tim but also Pierre, Domenico and Primaël) are continuing researching and designing what's next for Smoothie. We're spending a lot of time on making the knowledge page personalized and knowledgeable, without overwhelming you with information.
• Dev - The project is progressively moving to semantic PRs. What are semantic PRs you may ask ? They allow to create lists of changes more easily, to make news bulletins like this one easier to create.
• 2021-09 - Android - The release is still stuck on this migration issue. Help very welcome :)
• 2021-09 - iPhone - The build is broken, and we have a massive storage issue. iOS and Swift expert, your help would be most welcome.
• API documentation- The API documentation has been massively refreshed by Pierre, and has a new home thanks to automation work by Olivier and Pierre. Included are new developer use-cases, to implement the Nutri-Score, the Eco-Score or ingredient related features in your own app. We've rewritten passages that were not clear, and you can file issues whenever you'd like an improvement (or do a PR yourself following the instructions)
• Product Opener documentation- thanks to automation work by Pierre, documentation of Product Opener is now published regularly
• Hunger Games - Hunger Games releases have now been automated by Faufau: more reliable and faster releases of new features, and already, we now have a Country filter, an Eco-Score game, an upcoming nutrition game, a mass validation feature for moderators. Even more features are coming soon, like an exciting filtering revamp.
• Producers - Among other imports, we imported the products of French retailer Monoprix. If you'd like to help with producer imports and/or relationship, send a mail to producers@openfoodfacts.org

2021-08

• 2021-08-13 - Google Fellowship - All fellows are already making lasting impact:
  • Olivier automated the deployment of Product Opener (the server). This will mean more reliable and faster releases of new features on the web and through the API.
  • On the ML front, Yana is getting Robotoff into top shape, by making it easy to develop on your machine and to deploy for testing and release. She's joined by Shu on the same topic.
  • The Flutter team (fellows Jasmeet, Slava, Allie, Darren, Greg, Hans, Justin and Kate as well as Marvin and Monsieur Tanuki) has started improving the Smooth App codebase, while the Product and UI team (fellows Cal, Tim and Ako, but also Domenico, Primaël and Pierre) is conducting user surveys, and researching what's next for Smoothie.
  • The marketing and partnerships team (Barth, Mélanie, Jen and Eloïse) are working (among other things) on a Country-score card to help us focus our European expansion of the Eco-Score, and see what we need to do next.
  • And finally, on the Eco-Score front, Martin is doing exploratory work on individual computations, with very encouraging initial wins.
  • And thanks to Laura and Sebastien for the often forgotten yet essential coordination work.
• 2021-08-10 - Taxonomies - We've started mapping the carbon impact of individual ingredients. If you'd like to help Thomas, Arnaud, Pierre and others on the topic, join the #taxonomies channel. We're also looking for help translating the taxonomies in more languages.
• 2021-08-02 - Android - We're nearing release, with increased stability thanks to Vaiton. We still have some issues to solve, PRs to complete, and there's always room for new features and improvements.

2021-07

• 2021-07-29 - Wild School project' - Maxime, Cédric, Ahlem, Soufiane and Valentin in coordination with Tarik, Stéphane and Pierre, worked on a new visualisation engine for the Eco-Score data, as their WildSchool capstone project. It's already helping assess the impact of Eco-Score, and we hope to extend it to other topics.
• 2021-07-15 - iOS - Slava helped fix the build. A few PRs are waiting for review
• 2021-07-12 - 'Producers' - We're looking for volunteers to help us translate the presentations for producers into new languages (and possibly making contact)

• 2021-07-01 - Team - As announced previously (see the blog post), 10 Google employees are joining the Open Food Facts team full time for 6 months to work on the Eco-Score and a new Open Food Facts app! #fellowship on Slack.

2021-06

• 2021-06-14 - Team - Job offer: Open Food Facts is recruiting a full stack developer / French: Open Food Facts recrute un(e) développeur(euse)
• 2021-06-10 - Presentation - Stéphane made a lightning talk at the Perl Conference to present OFF. slides
• 2021-06-05 - Podcast about the environment - On World Environment Day, Pierre and Stéphane spoke with Dr Hannah Fry about Open Food Facts' environmental efforts and Google's support in the 6th episode of the Planet Progress podcast. Available now on your favorite platform (Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Stitcher)
• 2021-06-06 - Android documentation - You want to help with the next release of the Android app? We now have an automated documentation for the Android App, published at https://openfoodfacts.github.io/openfoodfacts-androidapp/

2021-05

• 2021-08-25 - Open Food Facts is extending the Eco-score throughout Europe, starting with 8 countries. More on the OFF blog
• 2021-08-25 - Google.org, in addition to the Google Impact Challenge, is giving us the benefit of the Google Fellowship. This will allow 7 Googlers to come and strengthen the permanent and volunteer teams for 6 months to help us improve our artificial intelligence algorithms and our mobile application. More on the OFF blog (French blogpost)

• 2021-05-24 - Team - Rosheen Naeem started an internship with Open Food Facts through the Outreachy program thanks to the Perl Foundation. Rosheen will be working on improving the code quality of the Perl backend of Open Food Facts.
• 2021-05-24 - Team - Hugo Delfaut started an internship with Open Food Facts. Hugo will be working on recruiting and supporting manufacturers to get them to open the data of their products, in particular through our platform for producers.
• 2021-05-14 - Wiki - We have updated the wiki engine and activated the visual editor that eases contribution a lot! No more need to be an expert of the wiki syntax.

2021-04

• 2021-04-13 - Open Food Facts is a laureate of the Google.org Impact Challenge, to amplify our environmental impact on a European scale, by measuring the environmental impact of food.
• 2021-04-11 - Computations of the Eco-Score are being extended beyond France. You can help in #ecoscore

2021-03

• 2021-03-12 - Podcast about the environment - Pierre was invited by Tristan Nitot (of Firefox fame) to talk about Open Food Facts's environmental efforts in the second episode of L'Octet Vert (French only)
• 2021-03-05 - Categorizing products directly from the image - Le Wagon students have worked on a new way to predict the category of a product directly from images, using the OCR. The preliminary results are really good for high level categories, and we're working to add the predictions to Robotoff. Thanks to Shadia, Capucine, Laure, Mickael & Aoife Mornard !

2021-02

• 2021-02-19 - Contribution - In partnership with the EREN scientists, we launched Opération Dentifrice (French) "Operation Toothpaste" on Open Beauty Facts
• 2021-02-18 - Infrastructure - New NVME disks have been installed in the OFF machines, and the OFF database and website are now much faster! (thanks to Christian Quest for the setup and install)
• 2021-02-12 - Extension for e-shopping - DriveOFF is an extension for Chrome and Firefox allowing you to consume better by displaying in real time the nutritional information of the products that you consult on many online food shopping sites. It's France only at the moment, but adding support for new websites is really easy. Those were shipped thanks to Clovis, as part of a Wild School student project. Join us on #estore_extension channel and on GitHub
• 2021-02-12 - Contribution and product history analysis - A Wild School student project worked on creating specialized MongoDB to explore all the revisions ever made of products, and all the contributions. This will pave the way to features like product reformulation tracking, and gamification for contributions, like personal reports of your contributions.
• 2021-02-12 - Infrastructure - The Robotoff infrastructure has been moved to the new OVH servers, and as a result, the MongoDB database used by the OFF web site is much more responsive.
• 2021-02-01 - Contribution - A new version of Hunger Game has been deployed (see #hunger-games channel).
• 2021-02-01 - Contribution - There are two small improvements on the website product form: it is now possible to clear all the nutrient data table with a dedicated button; the “save” button is in green, to be distinguished from other buttons.

2021-01

• 2021-01-17 - Open Beauty Facts Android alpha - The Android alpha of Open Beauty Facts has been refreshed. The refresh will make its way to beta soon. A new attributes system should enable us to deprecate the classic version soon. Help would be welcome into adding iPhone or Flutter support for Open Beauty Facts.
• 2021-01-07 - Release of the Eco-Score - The Eco-Score is an environmental score (ecoscore) from A to E which makes it easy to compare the impact of food products on the environment.
• 2021-01-07 - Android - Support for the Eco-Score. Unknown scores are now displayed in grey. All scores are now displayed in lists.
• 2021-01-07 - iPhone - Support for the Eco-Score. Unknown scores are now displayed in grey. All scores are now displayed in lists.
• 2021-01-07 - Web - Support for the Eco-Score + Personal Search. Unknown scores are now displayed. You can sort products by Nutri-Score, Eco-Score, and filter them according to your choices (which are kept on your browser only)

2020-12

• 2020-12-21 - iPhone: New version with simplified editing, preparation work for the Eco-Score (ability to add packaging photos and labels). Thanks to @aleene @philippeauriach @hferhmann @Ethenyl @jncosideout @tejuamirthi @raziqfarid @AshleySi @teolemon. Help welcome.
• 2020-12-11 - Community: Every week, Open Food Facts is receiving many questions from the general public, in different languages. We want to try to answer all these emails, so we launched a new project to allow some contributors to answer in the right language, while keeping questions private. Jonas Löser (@Jolesh on Slack and the Wiki) tested the platform and replied to some emails in German (thanks!). We also need help to answer emails in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Arabic... One email per week is already a appreciated contribution. Please ask @Charles Nepote if you want to join the effort.
• 2020-12-10 - Community: A draft of the Open Food Facts vision, mission, values and programs has been proposed and is being discussed.
• 2020-12-02 - Open Food Facts developpment: we're announcing our 5 major projects in 2021, and starting our donation campaign on Twitter. Spread the world!

2020-11

• 2020-11-37 - Environment - Work in progress: we are implementing a "forest footprint" based on the soy required for each ingredient of a product. Discussion on Slack in #ingredients and #empreinte-foret-fr (French)
• 2020-11-26 - Community - We are proposing to set up regular calls in English to present different aspects of the projects. discussion on Slack to schedule the first calls
• 2020-11-18 - Personal Search - The new product cards that use the product attributes are now in alpha testing on the OFF site
• 2020-11-17 - Producers - Producers can now send photos and data automatically to our producers platform through Equadis - Blog post in French
• 2020-11-14 - Android - A new version of the Android app is available. It provides a way to send packaging photos in an improved Environment tab, and makes it possible to replace the front photo easily while preserving the ability to send additional pictures. Underlying work for the Eco-Score has also been done, and we're looking for help on the iPhone/iOS side to match this exciting new release.
• 2020-11-14 - Packagings - Structured packaging data is now extracted from the packaging text (which can include recycling instructions) - Missions Emballages (French blog post)
• 2020-11-09 - Ingredients analysis - Sven has added ingredients recognition stats as of Oct 31 to Ingredients Analysis Quality Evaluation - March 2020 - May 2020. We continued to make huge progress in many languages!
• 2020-11-09 - Contributing - We are gathering input on what information would be useful to show to contributors for each product on pages that lists products: Product Attributes for Contributors
• 2020-11-07 - Eco-score - An alpha version of the Eco-score is now computed and shown to moderators. Join #ecoscore on Slack if you would like to test!
• 2020-11-04 - Community - Help needed. The work of the community has to be respected. Data and photos attribution helps us spread the word about Open Food Facts and attract new contributors and build the community. That's why we have published a public process related to our licences' compliance. Everyone can contribute: feel free to add and/or process clear cases of ODBL non-compliance, directly in this wiki page. The discussion takes place in our #licences channel on Slack.

2020-10

• 2020-10-06 - Packaging - @stephane introduced a new method to gather packaging information / recycling instructions, with a new packaging section, where we can select a new image for packaging info / recycling instructions, and a new text box to add packaging info. E.g. https://uk.openfoodfacts.org/product/5021638020005/rachel-s-organic-bio-live-yogurt Tests welcome, with various products from your country, to see how well it works (or not), and what we need to change?
• 2020-10-04 - Design - @Adam J has posted an interesting home page redesign to be discussed. Just have a look.
• 2020-10-03 - Products - @ggozlan with his app Foodbowel took thousands pics of kosher products in Paris. Thanks to @Seb, it's now online and help is needed to complete the data!

2020-09

• 2020-09-21 - Products - Some special thanks to @Phawinpon Chotwanvirat, @Marcello Ingannamorte, @Alex for their whole work in Thailand, Italy and Germany!
• 2020-09-20 - Ingredients - @Sven have made many improvements and got the UK ingredients down to 10% unknowns. @Marie is also working hard on french ingredients. Any help is welcome!
• 2020-09-20 - Media - @Seb is speaking on French national TV to present what Open Food Facts contributors do
• 2020-09-19 - Events - @Pierre presented Open Food Facts at the "Big Tour" in Paris
• 2020-09-18 - Code - @Sven made some very impressive performance improvements to the Open Food Facts backend
• 2020-09-17 - Community - We announced the "Journées OFF" (Days OFF) of the Open Food Facts non-profit association (in French)
• 2020-09-15 - Events - @Stephane presented Open Food Facts to medical university students
• 2020-09-05 - Blog post - La rentrée d'Open Food Facts en 6 actualités (in French, English post coming soon)

2020-08

• 2020-08-27 - API - New Product Attributes feature proposed
• 2020-08-26 - API - New Search API in development
• 2020-08 - Sea-side animations in France: we toured the coasts of France as part of "Big Tour" to present Open Food Facts, and quiz people about their knowledge of food, thanks to the work of Marie, Mickaël, Stephane and Pierre
• 2020-08-24 - Ongoing Android Release - This is the first release where part of the tedious release process was automated, thanks to the work of Philippe. A large refactoring effort has been undertaken by Vaiton. This, and the addition of crash analytics allowed us to make more iteration, resulting in more stability. New features, release and fixes by Vaiton, Pierre, anguye13, Varsha-29, hangy, pareichlin, Marinolino, kant, raychenon, LoGO0, sashabrava, RajaVamsi11 and possibly others.

All 25k OFF volunteers kept working hard: 1,4M products, 182 countries 🙂
1. OFF goes big in the US: 237k products with Nutri-Score !
2. Dark mode: lighter on your eyes, lighter on your battery
3. Help compute Nutri-Score: slide up for blue questions & get credited for your answers.
4. Massive improvements to the vegan, vegetarian & palm oil detection.
5. Instant product edition even with bad or no network
6. Products To Be Completed page (right menu) is now real time.

2020-07

• 2020-07-22 - Environment : To compute a new Eco-Score, created metrics to track the % of products we can match to Agribalyse environmental impact data and a plan to improve it
• 2020-07-15 - Events and communication : Marie and Mickaël have created step-by-step guides (currently in French) to create 2 simple workshops demonstrating the use of OFF to a general audience. (to be used during this summer "Microsoft Big Tour" event in France)
• 2020-07-10 - Artificial Intelligence: @Raphaël has updated the logo collection used in https://hunger.openfoodfacts.org/logos and for logo prediction, we now have 1.5 million of logos (instead of 600k previously). Please use it carefully and read the logo annotation guidelines before.
• 2020-07-03 - Producers : Non-food products (e.g. beauty products) imported through the platform for producers can now be redirected to Open Beauty Facts and Open Products Facts

2020-06

• 2020-06-29 - Artificial Intelligence: We have new members who joined our effort to extract nutrition facts data from photos. Join us in #ai-nutrition-table
• 2020-06-29 - Belgium ingredients: Busy cleaning up the unknown ingredients of products sold in Belgium. Implies cleaning the languages ingredient lists, adding languages, moving products, etc.(@aleene)
• 2020-06-28 - Ingredients parsing: Many improvements again this week, in particular for additives, in Spanish and many languages.
• 2020-06-26 - Development' : Areesha is continuing to create templates to ease HTML / design changes. A template for nutrition facts table was deployed this week.
• 2020-06-25 - Producers: Producers can now create free professional accounts to upload their product photos and data on the Platform for producers.
• 2020-06-19 - Special operations: To prepare research for a blog post on honey, French contributors reviewed and improved products in the honey category.
• 2020-06-18 - Ingredients parsing: Jussi and Charles Nepote have made big improvements in north Europe languages; 95% of finish ingredients are now recognized, and nearly 90% of danish ones.
• 2020-06-17 - Media: OFF was presented on TV in Belgium (RTBF), reported by Daniel
• 2020-06-15 - Web site: The advanced search form has more possibilities and it's easier to use them.
• 2020-06-09 - Community: We are launching an initiative for Even more transparency, openness and internationalisation for the management and day-to-day operations of the Open Food Facts project
• 2020-06-08 - Ingredients parsing: Acuario has improved (again!) a lot the Spanish ingredients and ingredients processing taxonomies.
  • Unknown ingredients went from 23% to 18% in the last 10 days!
• 2020-06-04 - New feature: a histogram is now automatically displayed when exploring products by NOVA groups
• 2020-06-04 - Documentation: a wiki page has been added to better document the ODBL License, with also suggestions to report and process ODBL non-compliance
• 2020-06-04 - Packager codes: Jussi has loaded the packager codes for Estonia, so we can now see the Estonian production places and the corresponding products on a map.
• 2020-06-02 - Ingredient translations: Acuario has made a great effort to identify more ingredients in spanish, which means better information for vegans, vegetarians, etc.
• 2020-06-01 - Strange languages: Aleene has finished his big cleaning the "unknow-language" category and others.

2020-05

• 2020-05-30 - Development: Areesha has started to "templatize" the Perl backend of Open Food Facts to separate the HTML from the code and make it easier to designers who are not familiar with Perl to improve the website design.
  • Feedback welcome: Areesha filed the first PR for the Nutri-Score details template.
• 2020-05-29 - Communication: New blog post A great thank you to the Mozilla and the Ford Foundation for their support to the new Open Food Facts app
• 2020-05-29 - Data imports: Galliance, a French manufacturer, used the Open Food Facts Platform for Producers to publish data and photos for their products of the Père Dodu brand.
• 2020-05-26 - Data imports: We now have beautiful photos for Ethiquable products in France, uploaded through the Producers Platform by Christophe of MyLabel
• 2020-05-25 - Translations: The Korean translations are progressing at a very fast pace, both for the apps and website, thanks to the hard work of 최은영 and Minjeong Lee over the past few days.
  • You can help for your language at https://translate.openfoodfacts.org/
• 2020-05-25 - Development: We published the first draft functional specs for the new search API for the Project:Personalized_Search project.
  • Feedback welcome! (on the talk page, or #personal-search channel on Slack)
• 2020-05-25 - Funding: Pierre Slamich sent the application for Open Food Facts to join GitHub Sponsors
• 2020-05-24 - R&D: Primaël Quémerais is testing an asynchronous scanner, able to scan 5 products simultaneously.
• 2020-05-20 - Personalized Search project: Stéphane Gigandet has published a detailed report related to first part of this NLNet funded project: Ingredients analysis and search features extraction.
• 2020-05-19 - Data quality: Stéphane Gigandet has published a progress report for ingredients analysis. 9 languages analyzed: Open Food Facts now recognize more than 80% ingredients for the majority of them (average of +2 points since march)! Congrats for the Finnish team, reaching more than 91%.
• 2020-05-18 - Team: Areesha Tariq joined as an Outreachy intern sponsored by The Perl Fundation to work on improving the code quality of the Open Food Facts backend (written in Perl), and in particular to add a templating system to better separate the presentation (HTML, JS and CSS) from the code.
• 2020-05-04 - Third party apps: Power User Script official new version (2020-05-04T10:39) -- Nutrition facts picture now takes all the place available.

2020-04

• 2020-04-29 - Wiki: We just migrated and updated current wikis on a new server. French and english wikis are now merged in a unique wiki.
• 2020-04-27 - Data import: We just got data for 140 products from Iglo, loaded through the new platform for producers: https://de.openfoodfacts.org/datenquelle/producer-iglo
• 2020-04-23 - Data import: We imported more than 130,000 new products from the USDA database.
• 2020-04-23 - Local communities: Italy has passed 10,000 products. Bravo a tutti!
• 2020-04-01 - Special operations: Operation ingredienti launch. It's dealing with products which ingredients are wrongly stored as french while italian.

2020-03

• 2020-03-30 - Local communities: Germany has now got more than 50,000 products. Danke schön!
• 2020-03-25 - Special operations: Operation zutaten launch. It's dealing with products which ingredients are wrongly stored as french while german.

How to spread the world?

We should frequently publish these news.

1. Twitter: some news are ready to tweet, don't hesitate.

2. On #general channel on our slack space. Example:

Some recent news about Open Food Facts:

• 2020-10-04 - Design - @Adam J has posted an interesting home page redesign to be discussed. Just have a look.
• 2020-10-03 - Products - @ggozlan with his app Foodbowel took thousands pics of kosher products in Paris. Thanks to @Seb, it's now online and help is needed to complete the data!

(Find past news and add your own on the wiki!)