[rojobuffalo]

You're absolutely right about datasets being a constraint for any new entrant. The USDA SR28 is free and open but limited scope. OpenFoodFacts has a great dataset overall but ~~you can't download it (other than rate-limited scraping),~~ the license is ~~strict~~ share-alike; and there isn't an OFF personal consumption tracker.

[sl956]

No need to scrape Open Food Facts, they kindly offer a download of the whole database as csv, rdf or mongodb dump: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data

It is 100% crowd sourced open data under the ODbL licence (same as OpenStreetMap).

[rojobuffalo]

Thanks for that correction. I recall there being a clear reason why I couldn't use their data in my app. But maybe I had it wrong. I remember reading that if my app collected new data about foods and I was using the OFF db, I had to commit to making all my data free and open. I was worried about the possible case that personal food consumption data would be vulnerable to that share-alike constraint.

[teolemon]

No, no worries about personal consumption. What the OdBL requires you to do is to add missing products. Not add data outside the scope of the original database. (I'm a Open Food Facts admin)

Also please don't scrape us, since we release nightly dumps of the DB :)

[rojobuffalo]

Thanks for clarifying that. And that's great that those DB downloads are available. I didn't like the idea of scraping the data in the first place so never went that route.

[teolemon]

Feel free to ping me at pierre openfoodfacts.org We have a online discussion chat, if you want to integrate OFF at some point, and have questions about the OdBL