Exploring Open Data & Open Source with Open Food Facts

1. Intro

• Nutrition 101
• Unprocessed vs Ultra Processed Food
• Nutrition labels on Packaged foods - India vs Chile

2. What does "Open" in Open Data & Open Source mean?

• Anyone can use, modify and share
• Open Data examples - Open Food Facts, data.gov.in, weather observations, Wikipedia etc
• Open Source examples - Linux; hosted on platforms like GitHub, GitLab

Today, contributing to Open Source is one of the strongest signals of practical software engineering skills.

3. Free Tools & Services to interact with OFF Data

• Datasette - open-source tool for exploring, analyzing, and publishing data.
• FlatGitHub - makes it easy to work with data in git and GitHub
• Hugging Face🤗 - for pretrained models, datasets and inference APIs
• Google Colab - for cloud-hosted Python notebooks

4. Open Food Facts - A Tour

• Nutrition Labels - Ingredients, Nutrients, Allergens
• NOVA - Food processing classification.
• Nutri-Score - Quick nutrition comparison.
• Facets - Find foods by ingredients and nutrition.
• Code Components
• OFF has been a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization in 2018, 2022, 2025 & 2026

5. Open Food Facts - Data

• CSV
• Parquet
• MongoDB
• JSONL
• SQL
• APIs

6. How You Can Contribute

• Scan products using Open Food Facts & add missing data
• Improve data quality
• Write code for new features
• Create data visualisations to create nutritional awareness
• Build AI apps on top of open datasets
• Translate to regional languages
• Fix or report issues

7. India Food Stats

• Packaged Food Products from India as CSV files
• NutriScan App - Decode Food with Your Mobile Browser
• Charts

Questions?