Open Food Facts Vision, Mission, Values and Programs
Open Food Facts is a global community with volunteers all over the world. It is supported by a registered non-profit organization headquartered in Paris.Vision
Everyone can improve the food system, for themselves and for others.
Mission
Provide open data, knowledge, tools and support for everyone to empower them to have the greatest positive impact on the food system.
- For consumers to make better informed food choices.
- For food producers to identify ways to improve the quality of their products and to be encouraged to improve it.
- For scientists to improve the collective knowledge of the long term impacts on what we eat on our health, the environment and society.
- For states to decide on the best public health policies and to help foster their adoption.
- For individuals, academics, non-profits, startups and companies to efficiently address issues with the food system and quickly deploy them worldwide.
Values
We are guided by the pursuit of the common good.
To guarantee that we don’t deviate from the common good, Open Food Facts is an independent, non-profit, collaborative, and community-driven organization.
To ensure we achieve the greatest possible common good, everything we produce is itself a freely reusable common good: all our data is open data and all our software is open source.
Programs
1. Build transparency with the Open Food Facts database and its vibrant community of contributors and reusers
The Open Food Facts database and the community that creates and reuses it is the foundation of everything we do. Our collaborative, free and open database of food products is often referred to as the Wikipedia of food products and many of our users and re-users call it a “treasure trove”. We call it a common good. It is a treasure, but a treasure that gains more value as we share it freely with the world.
The transparency we build is a game-changer to disruptively improve the food system. Transparency enables better individual and collective decisions, encourages good practices and motivates improvements, and makes solutions more efficient and quicker to build and deploy.
2. Encourage education with the Open Food Facts website and apps and the many services we enable others to create
An immediate effect of transparency is that product data can be turned into actionable information that consumers can use to make better informed choices.
We make this information through the Open Food Facts website and apps that are used monthly by millions of people. And we put this information in context, to explain what it means, why it’s important (for their health, the environment, and/or society), and how consumers can use it.
All the product data we gather and the information we derive from it is freely available as open data and more than 100 third party applications and services use it to inform and educate many more consumers in many different ways.
3. Drive food quality up with the Platform for Producers
Transparency helps producers to measure the quality of their products and to find ways to improve it.
Manufacturers can use our free platform for producers to publish data about their products, get reports about their nutritional quality and environmental impact, and suggestions on possible positive changes.
Transparency also provides producers with the motivation to improve their products and to compete more on their quality. Thanks to transparency, the best practices can become publicly known, recognized, and more widely adopted.
4. Advance science with Open Science and Citizen Science
The impact of the individual and collective decisions we make on which food to buy and how to produce it, directly depends on the scientific knowledge we base them on.
Transparency accelerates scientific research and cooperation to gain new knowledge.
The Open Food Facts database is a unique global resource that is used by scientists to study the long term impacts of the food we eat, and to elaborate tools such as rating systems to inform demand and encourage improvements to products.
In addition to making raw product data freely available to all scientists worldwide, we structure and analyze the data to make it much more directly useful for their research. We also work directly with research teams to understand how we can answer their needs, and to make the results of their research instantly available to all other researchers.