Our approach to open nutrition data

A good example of our philosophy is our decision not to purchase or rent an external food database.

Our goal is to provide a good tool for tracking nutrition but we are not going to simply buy the data that most other apps already have? It was not an easy decision but it was the only choice that truly aligns with our values.

First and most importantly, the data we looked into buying was not really good enough for our use-case. The biggest problem was that there is no reliable ingredient data, and even if some do, it still need lots of manual review to make it usable.

In addition our future goals include tracking more than just nutrition. We also care about recycling, materials, countries of origin, all of which are important in the bigger picture of sustainability.

One of our goals is to get you thinking about nutrition and what you eat, not just religiously following 4 questionably correct numbers. And since our core values include understanding full nutrition AND ingredients, we have no choice but to build this our-selves.

Yes, this will likely take years but we have many tools that helps us make the process faster. And with the community support we can make it even faster.

As a Nutriely user you can contribute by using our carefully crafted image tools we have developed image tools that let you avoid most of the typing by simply taking a picture of the package. While uploading and reading the image is not as lightning fast as barcode, you get much more in return.

And on top of that, we take the images, review them and contribute the new data to filling in the Open Food Facts database which works towards making food data transparent and available to everyone.

With that said, Nutriely also offers barcode scanning for verified foods that have already been submitted and reviewed. The result we return for a verified item contain ingredients, nutrition values on the package and often times more estimated nutrition values. You get to learn about the food without the hassle of typing. And also, the images you submit will be used to create nutrition data available for everyone, for free, through the open data project.

Take a look at preview of how you can create a food using images in our app: