Food Traceability Codes/EU Food establishments

The goal of this project is to establish a list of food establishments, to gather data about those establishments, to map food products to food establishments (using identifying codes and/or company names and street addresses), to use the data in the Open Food Facts applications and to enable other applications.

Regulation

It's possible to know the origin of food products thanks to several marks on the tag: health mark (processing company identification) and/or the packager number (packaging company identification) when its full name is not displayed:

• Health marks (estampille sanitaire in French) identify processing facilities that prepare, treat, transform, manipulate or store animal products or products from animal origins. For european countries, this mark is an oval shape on the package. The mark displays the information of the plant that processed the products: two letters for the country (FR for France, UK for United Kingdom, EG for Germany, EB for Latvia ...), two or three letter for the region (department number in France), three digits for the town (INSEE number is used in France, not postal code), and then the last digits identify the plant itself.
• Packager number: it's the identification code for the packaging companies or the importer when its name is not displayed. Under certain circonstances, it can replace the name of the producer when the production is subcontracted.

Food establishments codes and sources

Codes listed of food products labels includes:

• EU agreements / food establishments codes : http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biosafety/establishments/list_en.htm
• French EMB codes: http://agriculture.gouv.fr/liste-des-etablissements-agrees-ce
• Greek GR codes: http://www.efet.gr/portal/page/portal/efetnew/enterprises/facilities
• other countries packaging codes

Aggregated list of food establishments

• Code repository for lists, scripts and tools: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/eu-food-data

How to process official lists

• Use of french Agriculture Ministry files (hosted at https://github.com/openfoodfacts/eu-food-data/blob/master/fr/urls-fr.txt) to extract list of certification (CE Approval number).
• Definition of a common structure for the table, such as:
  • Type (name of category used by administration, ie name of the list)
  • Libelle autorisation/Approval description (for fish processing facilities)
  • Numero de departement/Department number
  • Numero agrement/Approval number
  • SIRET/Local Number
  • Processus/Process (for fish processing facilities)
  • Raison Sociale/Name
  • Adresse/Adress
  • Code Postal/Postal Code
  • Commune/Town
  • Espece/Species (for wild games or fish processing facilities)
• Concatenation of file to obtain a list of all approved processes
• Pivot table to create the list of all approved companies

IMPORTANT NOTE: An approval number is unique.A company can have several approved processes, but they will all have the same approval number.

• Update list with other official lists, such as derogatory approvals, ...

France

• Complete list of approved processes (as of July 2014): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pmainguet/eu-food-data/master/fr/140802_Liste_Certif_EMB_CE_MinAgri
• Complete list of approved companies (as of July 2014): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pmainguet/eu-food-data/master/fr/140802_Liste_EMB_CE_MinAgri.csv

United Kingdom

To-do list:

• find a way to manage the data available there http://www.food.gov.uk/enforcement/sectorrules
• perhaps contact helpline@foodstandards.gsi.gov.uk as no appropriate contact was found on http://www.food.gov.uk/about-us/contact-us/contact-details-by-topic/contact-us-uk . The goal is to see if there is a more API friendly way to get the data.

To do

• Add derogatory approvals, see http://agriculture.gouv.fr/liste-des-etablissements
• Search for EMB list approvals

Use of the food establishments list inside Open Food Facts

• Display information on packager page (company name, street address, type of facility etc.)
• Geo-code addresses and display on http://cestemballepresdechezvous.fr

See-also

Aggregated (but not open) list of EU codes: http://www.eucode.info/