Team Producers

Welcome to the Wiki page about the Team dedicated to onboarding food manufacturers in Open Food Facts! 😊

What is the team Producers?

The structure of the community

In order to create a greater impact, the community of Open Food Facts has been structured by skills. When a group of volunteers is interested and working on the same topic, we call this group a team.

If you're new to Open Food Facts and are interested in joining a team, please fill up the Skill Pool Form. 💪

About the team Producers

Open Food Facts' main goal is to be the largest possible open database for food products. To enrich the database, we can count on contributors... but also on food manufacturers! Indeed, as they are the source of the data, which often means that they are able to provide good quality data, and in bigger volumes than manual individual contributions.

Our goal, in the team Producers, is to encourage more and more food producers to contribute to Open Food Facts by sharing information about their products via the Pro Platform of Open Food Facts.

Why?

Getting data from food producers ensures we have complete and fresh data on their products.

Reaching out to producers is also a great opportunity to encourage them to become actors of transparency in the food industry, as more and more consumers are requesting it. In most cases, producers are motivated to regain control over public information about their products. More than 3 million visitors are consulting Open Food Facts on a monthly basis, so it is in their interest to present accurate data, and up-to-date product images.

Also, relying on the Pro Platform and its multiple tools and alerts, our role is to nudge producers to improve the quality of their products - both on the nutritional and the environmental aspects. See also The virtuous circle of transparency.

The main activities

Identify - This stage consists of identifying producers that would be inclined to share their data with Open Food Facts (company name, relevant contact, ideally an email address or LinkedIn URL, ...)
Connect - This step consists of getting in touch with the producers, identified in step 1, via LinkedIn and/or email.
Meet - Once the meeting with a producer is scheduled, it's time to pitch the project!
Accompany - Congratulations! The producer has agreed to share product data 🎉 Now, it is a matter of accompanying the user from the creation of his account on the Pro Platform to the import of the data.
Interview - This last step consists of meeting producers to collect feedback to improve the Pro platform, and asking them for testimonials for communication purposes.

How to join this team? 👋

The first steps

The first thing to do is to fill up the Skill Pool form and register your interest in the team Producers.
You will have an onboarding call with the team leader - a great way to get to know each other and make sure to be on the same page :-)
Once integrated into the team, you can decide what you'd like to take on, and you'll be invited to join our monthly meet-up!

Resources and tools

The Toolkit - where you'll find all the useful documents to start as a member of the team Producers 🙌

Communication

Find us on our Community messaging app Slack: #producers

or via email: producers@openfoodfacts.org

Looking forward to hearing from you! ☀️