Obsolete products

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In the Open Food Facts ecosystem, we call obsolete a product that is no longer sold.

In real life

Obsolete products can be hard to identify. Some products are not sold anymore in a supermarket or a region, but that does not mean they are no more elsewhere.

The main source for the obsolete products should be the producers themselves: they know when they stopped to produce them. BUT, some products can be used or sold a long time after they have been sold:

  • food products with a long shelf life, sometimes years or even dozens of years (!)
  • non-food products that can be used for a long time; eg. a car

In Open Food Facts

It is important to know the obsolete products:

  • we should exclude them from some stats
  • we should exclude them from normal search (while making possible to specifically search for them or with them)
  • we could completely block their modification if data are complete and verified
  • etc.

How to tag?

Obsolete products can be tagged by moderators at the beginning of the "edit" page. We don't let any user to do this because it can be hard to be sure.

How to find products tagged as obsolete?

Each obsolete product is still visible on Open Food Facts (example). A message tells the user it is obsolete.

Obsolete products are still exported as CSV data -- but obsolete field is not exported.

When using the API, obsolete products are identified by fields beginning by "obsolete":

  • obsolete: should only contain "on"
  • obsolete_imported: can contain "1" to represent that the information has been imported from our pro platform
  • obsolete_since_date: the withdrawal date: the date when the product have been removed from the market
  • obsolete_since_date_imported:

How to find products that could be obsolete?

Few producers are sending us data related to obsolete products. So we're probably missing dozens of thousands of products which are not sold anymore. Is it possible to evaluate how many? Is it possible to detect these products?

Products which should not be obsolete

The products which have been recently created are likely to be alive. There are easy to identify with the creation date (the created_t field in the database or in the various exports we provide). That said, some recently created products could also be obsolete a few months after they have been entered: they could have not succeeded, they good have been old products entered for "archaeological" reasons, etc.

Products getting a recently uploaded photo are also likely to be alive. In the majority of the cases, it means that someone, thanks to the Open Food Facts app or third party apps, have taken a photo of the product, which is likely to be still sold somewhere. For each photo of product, the uploaded_t field contains the date of the upload. And the last_image_t field tells the date of the last added image.

Also, the field scans_n measure the number of unique scans of a product, for the last year. If the same user is scanning the product many times in a unique session, it will be counted as one scan. Products that have a data value for scans_n have been scanned at least one time in the previous year, and are likely to be still alive, but we can't guaranty.

Products which could be obsolete

On the other hand, products that do not have a value for scans_n haven't been scanned last year, but it does not mean they are not alive anymore:

  • it can be rare products
  • it can be products that are only sold in little areas
  • it could be products that are only sold once in two or more years

How many obsolete products in reality?

It's hard to say. Currently, we can provide scanning stats only for the last year: in 2024, based on scans_n, here are the stats related to scanned products, thanks to this Mirabelle request:

nb_of_products sum_unique_scans nb_of_scanned_products pct_of_scanned_products
3585511 4207189 1339159 37

This mean that 63% of the products created in Open Food Facts database before 2025, haven't been scanned at all in 2024, representing 3,585,511-1,339,159 = 2,246,352 products.

That said, in these 63%, thousands of these products still exist:

  • some of them haven't been scanned because they are rare
  • some of them haven't been scanned because people scanning are still too few in the country where the product is sold

Bug and feature request

In our bug tracking and feature request system, we have a category dedicated to obsolete products.