However, keeping and maintaining an accurate food database is a big, costly, task that makes adopting new markets harder and obviously adds a substantial maintenance cost for each market.
Projects like this makes more markets accessible, especially small ones as cost per potential user is higher, and lay the foundation for cross-service-collaborations (i.e. log in your fitness app and the data shows up in your diabetes app as well).
If someone is looking for partnerships with regards to keeping food databases, feel free to contact us!
[1]: https://www.tummylab.com - swedish only, sry :/
* Searching alternative foods based on macro composition of a product.
* Searching alternative brands to a product, for price, availability or healthier contents.
* Tracking changes in a product.
* Discovering products based on some user input.
Checking what ingredients a product has (or how many calories it contains) seem like necessities only if you are dealing with mysterious processed food. I'll go out on limb here and assert that these problems don't really arise with traditional ingredients or preparations.
Seems like a likely losing strategy with this audience.
In that sense I think Soylent would be technically fine if it was clinically proven to be safe in a very rigorous way, but I know a lot of people who would never buy the idea because they have a different vision of how the world should be.
The quote below from the openfood.ch website implies that the database is needed because it does not exist. We need a more robust normative debate than that.
"Is there a need for such a database? Absolutely. Today, there is no database on Swiss food products that is truly open, free, and - perhaps most importantly - programmatically accessible via an API). The latter point is particularly important as it allows for the creation of an ecosystem around open food data, one of the main goals of openfood.ch."
I don't see how your argument makes any sense.
It's not enough to be an engineer and build "cool stuff". You have to consider the consequences.
(I'm using "we" language because I believe in some kind of socialism and strongly object to the narratives being proposed by blockchain enthusiasts or seasteaders who want to give up on the idea of any kind of state authority)
It's less of a need for B2C applications, but still an important factor depending on the product or brands target consumer. The "label reader" persona is an easy one to see value.
These exist commercially, the one I'm most aware of is SmartLabel: Bacon Example: http://smartlabel.labelinsight.com/product/2709932/nutrition
I mean, what are the use cases for this database? It seems like a fetishization of data for data's sake.