Open Food Facts
Empowering everyone to make more sustainable food choices.
The European Commission Joint Research Centre estimates that over 34% of human-made greenhouse emissions are from food systems. But historically, it has been practically impossible to visualise the environmental impact created by different food products.
Open Food Facts built the Eco-Score tool to do just that. They were assisted by a team of Google.org Fellows to improve the tool and expand its reach, to help more people make climate-conscious food choices.
“What we achieved in six months would have taken us 3, 4, maybe 5 years of work!”
– Stephane Gigandet,
CTO of Open Food Facts
How the Google.org Fellows helped
- 12 Google.org Fellows assisted Open Food Facts including software engineers, user experience designers, and product managers.
- Utilised AI to predict product categories and assign an Eco-Score to products.
- Simplified the user experience, redesigned the existing app, and launched a new Flutter-based app.
- Unlocked new partnerships with industry giants PepsiCo and Carrefour.
Impact of the project
- Open Food Facts’ Eco-Score was expanded to 49 new countries
- Monthly users increased by approximately 30% to over 2.7M.
- Created iOS and Android apps, with over 500K downloads.
- Calculated the Eco-Score of over 500K new food products, 80% of which were categorised by AI.
- New production processes enabled new features to be launched over 10x faster.