Project:What's in my yogurt?

Open Food Facts is launching in January 2013 the "What's in my Yogurt?" project. Individuals from all around the world are invited to photograph and collect data on yogurts sold in their country so that they can be added to the Open Food Facts database. The data will be used to create comparative charts and guides for yogurts sold in one country (e.g. which yogurts have the less fat, the more sugar, the less additives etc., but also to compare yogurts from one country to another.

Why focus on a single category of products?

Having a great number of products from one category sold in one country makes it possible to create very cool applications that can demonstrate the value of having a free and open database of food products. We can compute mean nutrition values, we can show all products in a graph (e.g. fat on one axis and sugar on the other axis), we can build games like http://combiendesucres.fr ? (How much sugar? currently in French, hopefully in many more languages when the What's in my yogurt? project completes!). We did a similar operation for sodas in France, and it helped a lot to make Open Food Facts much more widely known. You can think of the What's in my yogurt? project as a trojan horse to get our way into people's fridges and cupboards! :-)

Why yogurts?

• Many people eat yogurts
• In particular kids eat a lot of yogurts
• There are a lot of differences in how yogurts are made and in their composition accross the globe: additives, fat-free, sugar-free, milk-free etc.

Why a global project?

• To demonstrate the uses for a global database of food products
• To discover differences in products from different part of the world
• To start, develop and/or motivate local communities of Open Food Facts contributors
• To use this opportunity to improve the multi-lingual and multi-country support of Open Food Facts

What's in my yogurt? project site

• registered whatsinmyyogurt.com
• brief description of the project, motivations etc.
• real time status: number of yogurts in all the different countries
  • boosts friendly competition between countries
  • also special teams: Organic, Blueberry, Humane Farming etc.
• links to re-uses of the data
  • e.g. world map showing yogurt sizes accross the world
• partners
  • e.g. yogurt producers who have directly contributed data for their products

How do we proceed?

Let's form teams of contributors who are interested by the project and are willing to add yogurts to the database! It's more fun when several people collaborate towards a common goal, and we can have some friendly competition between teams. :-)

We can form teams for different countries or regions, or on a given theme (e.g. organic yogurts, strawberry yogurts etc.)

Do you want to participate? Create an account on Open Food Facts, log-in to the wiki, add your name to the teams of your choosing and start adding yogurts!

If you can recruit and motivate other contributors, please add yourself as a lead! (A team can have several leads and this be even more active)

Countries and regions

In A-Z order.

Belgium

Team leads:

Team members:

Yogurts:

• Hard to tell yogurts that are sold in Belgium versus yogurts sold in France (and the Netherlands?)
• Add "Belgique" in the Country of distribution (to be created) field

France

Team leads:

Team members:

• Stéphane

Yogurts

• 172 yogurts before the start of the team
• http://fr.openfoodfacts.org/categorie/yaourts

French Carribean (Antilles: Martinique, Guadeloupe)

Team leads:

Team members:

Interesting questions:

• Do yogurts contain more sugar in the French Carribean than they do in metropolitan France?

Themes: Labels

Humane Farming yogurts

Team leads:

Team members:

• Stéphane

Data analysis

What can we compare?

• Ingredients
• Nutrition facts
• Labels
• Packaging (e.g. un-needed extra packaging)
• Portion size
  • How big is my yogurt?
• ...

Architecture: improvements needed

• Multi-lingual support for categories
• Some way to create and maintain list of categories with translations
• Automated stats / chart etc. for the various teams listed above

Translation

• Hierarchy of yogurt sub-categories
  • exists in French
  • translate to English
  • and then other languages