Reusing Open Food Facts Data

Open Food Facts data is released as Open Data: it can be reused freely by anyone, under the Open Database License (ODBL).

Where is the data?

You'll find different kind of ways to get the data.

Looking for a selection of products?

Then use the advanced search. The Open Food Facts advanced search feature allows to download selections of the data. See: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl

When you search is done, you will be able to download the selection in CSV or Excel format, just give a try!

Looking for the whole database?

The whole database can be downloaded at https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data

It's very big. Open Food Facts hosts more than 1,200,000 products (as of April 2020). So you will probably need skills to reuse the data.

You'll be able to find there different kinds of data.

The MongoDB daily export

It represents the most complete data; it's very big and you have to know how to deal with MongoDB.

The jsonl daily export

While still undocumented, there is a daily export of the whole database in jsonl format. It represents the same data as the MongoDB export. It's very big! More than 14GB uncompressed.

You can find it at https://static.openfoodfacts.org/data/openfoodfacts-products.jsonl.gz

The CSV daily export

It represents a subset of the database but it is generally fitted to the majority of usages. It's a 2.3GB file (as of April 2020), so it can't be opened by Libre Office or Excel with an 8GB machine.

How to reuse?

CSV daily export

csvkit tips

csvkit is a very efficient tool to manipulate huge amounts of CSV data. Here are some useful tips to manipulate Open Food Facts CSV export.

Selecting 2 columns. Selecting two or three columns can be useful for some usages. Extracting two columns produce a smaller CSV file which can be opened by common softwares such as Libre Office or Excel. The following command creates a CSV file (brands.csv) containing two columns from Open Food Facts (code and brands). (It generally takes more than 2 minutes, depending on your computer.)

$ csvcut -t -c code,brands en.openfoodfacts.org.products.csv > brands.csv

Selecting products based on a regular expression. csvkit can search in some specified fields, allowing to make powerful selections. The following command creates a CSV file (selection.csv) containing all products where the barcode (code) is beginning by 325798 (-r "^325798(.*)").

$ csvgrep -t -c code -r "^325798(.*)" en.openfoodfacts.org.products.csv > selection.csv

The following command creates a CSV file (calissons.csv) containing all products where the category (categories) is containing "calisson".

$ csvgrep -t -c categories -r "calisson" en.openfoodfacts.org.products.csv > calisson.csv

Import CSV in PostgreSQL

See this article: https://blog-postgresql.verite.pro/2018/12/21/import-openfoodfacts.html (in french, but should be understandable with Google Translator).

Import CSV to SQLite

The repository foodrescue-content contains Ruby scripts that import Open Food Facts CSV data into a SQLite database with full table normalization. Only a few fields are imported so far, but this an be extended easily. Data imported so far includes:

• barcode number
• product name
• product categories
• product countries
• full categories hierarchy imported from the categories.txt taxonomy (see)

Python

There are some articles dealing with using Python language to explore Open Food Facts data.

Step by step commands: http://www.xavierdupre.fr/app/ensae_teaching_cs/helpsphinx/notebooks/prepare_data_2017.html (also in french)

Python notebooks are great to learn Open Food Facts data, as they mix code and results together:

• Find dozens of python notebooks on Kaggle
• https://www.datasciencesociety.net/part-1-exploring-food-data/

R stat

For people who have R stat skills, there are more than 50 notebooks from Kaggle community.

jsonl export

jsonl is a huge file! It's not possible to play with it with common editors or common tools. But there is some command line tools that allows interesting things, like jq.

jq

• start decompress the file (be carreful => 14GB after decompression):

$ gunzip openfoodfacts-products.jsonl.gz

• work on a small subset to test. E.g. for 100 products:

$ head -n 100 openfoodfacts-products.jsonl > small.jsonl

You can start playing with jq. Here are examples.

$ cat small.jsonl | jq . # print all file in JSON format

$ cat small.jsonl | jq -r .code # print all products' codes.

$ cat small.jsonl | jq -r '[.code,.product_name] | @csv' # output a CSV file containing code,product_name