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 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 PostGRE SQL

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

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:

R stat

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