News

This page is a test to understand what news we should announce. Maybe it could lead to build a newsletter.

For the moment, we just log some interesting news lost in the Slack space or elsewhere.

Each entry shouldn't be longer than three to five lines of text. Even better if it fits under 280 chars (twitter limit).
Links are good.
Proposed format: Date - Topic: announcement.

2021-03

2021-03-12 - Podcast about the environment - Pierre was invited by Tristan Nitot (of Firefox fame) to talk about Open Food Facts's environmental efforts in the second episode of L'Octet Vert (French only)
2021-03-05 - Categorizing products directly from the image - Le Wagon students have worked on a new way to predict the category of a product directly from images, using the OCR. The preliminary results are really good for high level categories, and we're working to add the predictions to Robotoff. Thanks to Shadia, Capucine, Laure, Mickael & Aoife Mornard !

2021-02

2021-02-19 - Contribution - In partnership with the EREN scientists, we launched Opération Dentifrice (French) "Operation Toothpaste" on Open Beauty Facts
2021-02-18 - Infrastructure - New NVME disks have been installed in the OFF machines, and the OFF database and website are now much faster! (thanks to Christian Quest for the setup and install)
2021-02-12 - Extension for e-shopping - DriveOFF is an extension for Chrome and Firefox allowing you to consume better by displaying in real time the nutritional information of the products that you consult on many online food shopping sites. It's France only at the moment, but adding support for new websites is really easy. Those were shipped thanks to Clovis, as part of a Wild School student project. Join us on #estore_extension channel and on GitHub
2021-02-12 - Contribution and product history analysis - A Wild School student project worked on creating specialized MongoDB to explore all the revisions ever made of products, and all the contributions. This will pave the way to features like product reformulation tracking, and gamification for contributions, like personal reports of your contributions.
2021-02-12 - Infrastructure - The Robotoff infrastructure has been moved to the new OVH servers, and as a result, the MongoDB database used by the OFF web site is much more responsive.
2021-02-01 - Contribution - A new version of Hunger Game has been deployed (see #hunger-games channel).
2021-02-01 - Contribution - There are two small improvements on the website product form: it is now possible to clear all the nutrient data table with a dedicated button; the “save” button is in green, to be distinguished from other buttons.

2021-01

2021-01-17 - Open Beauty Facts Android alpha - The Android alpha of Open Beauty Facts has been refreshed. The refresh will make its way to beta soon. A new attributes system should enable us to deprecate the classic version soon. Help would be welcome into adding iPhone or Flutter support for Open Beauty Facts.
2021-01-07 - Release of the Eco-Score - The Eco-Score is an environmental score (ecoscore) from A to E which makes it easy to compare the impact of food products on the environment.
2021-01-07 - Android - Support for the Eco-Score. Unknown scores are now displayed in grey. All scores are now displayed in lists.
2021-01-07 - iPhone - Support for the Eco-Score. Unknown scores are now displayed in grey. All scores are now displayed in lists.
2021-01-07 - Web - Support for the Eco-Score + Personal Search. Unknown scores are now displayed. You can sort products by Nutri-Score, Eco-Score, and filter them according to your choices (which are kept on your browser only)

2020-12

2020-12-21 - iPhone: New version with simplified editing, preparation work for the Eco-Score (ability to add packaging photos and labels). Thanks to @aleene @philippeauriach @hferhmann @Ethenyl @jncosideout @tejuamirthi @raziqfarid @AshleySi @teolemon. Help welcome.
2020-12-11 - Community: Every week, Open Food Facts is receiving many questions from the general public, in different languages. We want to try to answer all these emails, so we launched a new project to allow some contributors to answer in the right language, while keeping questions private. Jonas Löser (@Jolesh on Slack and the Wiki) tested the platform and replied to some emails in German (thanks!). We also need help to answer emails in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Arabic... One email per week is already a appreciated contribution. Please ask @Charles Nepote if you want to join the effort.
2020-12-10 - Community: A draft of the Open Food Facts vision, mission, values and programs has been proposed and is being discussed.
2020-12-02 - Open Food Facts developpment: we're announcing our 5 major projects in 2021, and starting our donation campaign on Twitter. Spread the world!

2020-11

2020-11-37 - Environment - Work in progress: we are implementing a "forest footprint" based on the soy required for each ingredient of a product. Discussion on Slack in #ingredients and #empreinte-foret-fr (French)
2020-11-26 - Community - We are proposing to set up regular calls in English to present different aspects of the projects. discussion on Slack to schedule the first calls
2020-11-18 - Personal Search - The new product cards that use the product attributes are now in alpha testing on the OFF site
2020-11-17 - Producers - Producers can now send photos and data automatically to our producers platform through Equadis - Blog post in French
2020-11-14 - Android - A new version of the Android app is available. It provides a way to send packaging photos in an improved Environment tab, and makes it possible to replace the front photo easily while preserving the ability to send additional pictures. Underlying work for the Eco-Score has also been done, and we're looking for help on the iPhone/iOS side to match this exciting new release.
2020-11-14 - Packagings - Structured packaging data is now extracted from the packaging text (which can include recycling instructions) - Missions Emballages (French blog post)
2020-11-09 - Ingredients analysis - Sven has added ingredients recognition stats as of Oct 31 to Ingredients Analysis Quality Evaluation - March 2020 - May 2020. We continued to make huge progress in many languages!
2020-11-09 - Contributing - We are gathering input on what information would be useful to show to contributors for each product on pages that lists products: Product Attributes for Contributors
2020-11-07 - Eco-score - An alpha version of the Eco-score is now computed and shown to moderators. Join #ecoscore on Slack if you would like to test!
2020-11-04 - Community - Help needed. The work of the community has to be respected. Data and photos attribution helps us spread the word about Open Food Facts and attract new contributors and build the community. That's why we have published a public process related to our licences' compliance. Everyone can contribute: feel free to add and/or process clear cases of ODBL non-compliance, directly in this wiki page. The discussion takes place in our #licences channel on Slack.

2020-10

2020-10-06 - Packaging - @stephane introduced a new method to gather packaging information / recycling instructions, with a new packaging section, where we can select a new image for packaging info / recycling instructions, and a new text box to add packaging info. E.g. https://uk.openfoodfacts.org/product/5021638020005/rachel-s-organic-bio-live-yogurt Tests welcome, with various products from your country, to see how well it works (or not), and what we need to change?
2020-10-04 - Design - @Adam J has posted an interesting home page redesign to be discussed. Just have a look.
2020-10-03 - Products - @ggozlan with his app Foodbowel took thousands pics of kosher products in Paris. Thanks to @Seb, it's now online and help is needed to complete the data!

2020-09

2020-09-21 - Products - Some special thanks to @Phawinpon Chotwanvirat, @Marcello Ingannamorte, @Alex for their whole work in Thailand, Italy and Germany!
2020-09-20 - Ingredients - @Sven have made many improvements and got the UK ingredients down to 10% unknowns. @Marie is also working hard on french ingredients. Any help is welcome!
2020-09-20 - Media - @Seb is speaking on French national TV to present what Open Food Facts contributors do
2020-09-19 - Events - @Pierre presented Open Food Facts at the "Big Tour" in Paris
2020-09-18 - Code - @Sven made some very impressive performance improvements to the Open Food Facts backend
2020-09-17 - Community - We announced the "Journées OFF" (Days OFF) of the Open Food Facts non-profit association (in French)
2020-09-15 - Events - @Stephane presented Open Food Facts to medical university students
2020-09-05 - Blog post - La rentrée d'Open Food Facts en 6 actualités (in French, English post coming soon)

2020-08

2020-08-27 - API - New Product Attributes feature proposed
2020-08-26 - API - New Search API in development
2020-08 - Sea-side animations in France: we toured the coasts of France as part of "Big Tour" to present Open Food Facts, and quiz people about their knowledge of food, thanks to the work of Marie, Mickaël, Stephane and Pierre
2020-08-24 - Ongoing Android Release - This is the first release where part of the tedious release process was automated, thanks to the work of Philippe. A large refactoring effort has been undertaken by Vaiton. This, and the addition of crash analytics allowed us to make more iteration, resulting in more stability. New features, release and fixes by Vaiton, Pierre, anguye13, Varsha-29, hangy, pareichlin, Marinolino, kant, raychenon, LoGO0, sashabrava, RajaVamsi11 and possibly others.

All 25k OFF volunteers kept working hard: 1,4M products, 182 countries 🙂
1. OFF goes big in the US: 237k products with Nutri-Score !
2. Dark mode: lighter on your eyes, lighter on your battery
3. Help compute Nutri-Score: slide up for blue questions & get credited for your answers.
4. Massive improvements to the vegan, vegetarian & palm oil detection.
5. Instant product edition even with bad or no network
6. Products To Be Completed page (right menu) is now real time.

2020-07

2020-07-22 - Environment : To compute a new Eco-Score, created metrics to track the % of products we can match to Agribalyse environmental impact data and a plan to improve it
2020-07-15 - Events and communication : Marie and Mickaël have created step-by-step guides (currently in French) to create 2 simple workshops demonstrating the use of OFF to a general audience. (to be used during this summer "Microsoft Big Tour" event in France)
2020-07-10 - Artificial Intelligence: @Raphaël has updated the logo collection used in https://hunger.openfoodfacts.org/logos and for logo prediction, we now have 1.5 million of logos (instead of 600k previously). Please use it carefully and read the logo annotation guidelines before.
2020-07-03 - Producers : Non-food products (e.g. beauty products) imported through the platform for producers can now be redirected to Open Beauty Facts and Open Products Facts

2020-06

2020-06-29 - Artificial Intelligence: We have new members who joined our effort to extract nutrition facts data from photos. Join us in #ai-nutrition-table
2020-06-29 - Belgium ingredients: Busy cleaning up the unknown ingredients of products sold in Belgium. Implies cleaning the languages ingredient lists, adding languages, moving products, etc.(@aleene)
2020-06-28 - Ingredients parsing: Many improvements again this week, in particular for additives, in Spanish and many languages.
2020-06-26 - Development' : Areesha is continuing to create templates to ease HTML / design changes. A template for nutrition facts table was deployed this week.
2020-06-25 - Producers: Producers can now create free professional accounts to upload their product photos and data on the Platform for producers.
2020-06-19 - Special operations: To prepare research for a blog post on honey, French contributors reviewed and improved products in the honey category.
2020-06-18 - Ingredients parsing: Jussi and Charles Nepote have made big improvements in north Europe languages; 95% of finish ingredients are now recognized, and nearly 90% of danish ones.
2020-06-17 - Media: OFF was presented on TV in Belgium (RTBF), reported by Daniel
2020-06-15 - Web site: The advanced search form has more possibilities and it's easier to use them.
2020-06-09 - Community: We are launching an initiative for Even more transparency, openness and internationalisation for the management and day-to-day operations of the Open Food Facts project
2020-06-08 - Ingredients parsing: Acuario has improved (again!) a lot the Spanish ingredients and ingredients processing taxonomies.
- Unknown ingredients went from 23% to 18% in the last 10 days!
2020-06-04 - New feature: a histogram is now automatically displayed when exploring products by NOVA groups
2020-06-04 - Documentation: a wiki page has been added to better document the ODBL License, with also suggestions to report and process ODBL non-compliance
2020-06-04 - Packager codes: Jussi has loaded the packager codes for Estonia, so we can now see the Estonian production places and the corresponding products on a map.
2020-06-02 - Ingredient translations: Acuario has made a great effort to identify more ingredients in spanish, which means better information for vegans, vegetarians, etc.
2020-06-01 - Strange languages: Aleene has finished his big cleaning the "unknow-language" category and others.

2020-05

2020-05-30 - Development: Areesha has started to "templatize" the Perl backend of Open Food Facts to separate the HTML from the code and make it easier to designers who are not familiar with Perl to improve the website design.
- Feedback welcome: Areesha filed the first PR for the Nutri-Score details template.
2020-05-29 - Communication: New blog post A great thank you to the Mozilla and the Ford Foundation for their support to the new Open Food Facts app
2020-05-29 - Data imports: Galliance, a French manufacturer, used the Open Food Facts Platform for Producers to publish data and photos for their products of the Père Dodu brand.
2020-05-26 - Data imports: We now have beautiful photos for Ethiquable products in France, uploaded through the Producers Platform by Christophe of MyLabel
2020-05-25 - Translations: The Korean translations are progressing at a very fast pace, both for the apps and website, thanks to the hard work of 최은영 and Minjeong Lee over the past few days.
- You can help for your language at https://translate.openfoodfacts.org/
2020-05-25 - Development: We published the first draft functional specs for the new search API for the Project:Personalized_Search project.
- Feedback welcome! (on the talk page, or #personal-search channel on Slack)
2020-05-25 - Funding: Pierre Slamich sent the application for Open Food Facts to join GitHub Sponsors
2020-05-24 - R&D: Primaël Quémerais is testing an asynchronous scanner, able to scan 5 products simultaneously.
2020-05-20 - Personalized Search project: Stéphane Gigandet has published a detailed report related to first part of this NLNet funded project: Ingredients analysis and search features extraction.
2020-05-19 - Data quality: Stéphane Gigandet has published a progress report for ingredients analysis. 9 languages analyzed: Open Food Facts now recognize more than 80% ingredients for the majority of them (average of +2 points since march)! Congrats for the Finnish team, reaching more than 91%.
2020-05-18 - Team: Areesha Tariq joined as an Outreachy intern sponsored by The Perl Fundation to work on improving the code quality of the Open Food Facts backend (written in Perl), and in particular to add a templating system to better separate the presentation (HTML, JS and CSS) from the code.
2020-05-04 - Third party apps: Power User Script official new version (2020-05-04T10:39) -- Nutrition facts picture now takes all the place available.

2020-04

2020-04-29 - Wiki: We just migrated and updated current wikis on a new server. French and english wikis are now merged in a unique wiki.
2020-04-27 - Data import: We just got data for 140 products from Iglo, loaded through the new platform for producers: https://de.openfoodfacts.org/datenquelle/producer-iglo
2020-04-23 - Data import: We imported more than 130,000 new products from the USDA database.
2020-04-23 - Local communities: Italy has passed 10,000 products. Bravo a tutti!
2020-04-01 - Special operations: Operation ingredienti launch. It's dealing with products which ingredients are wrongly stored as french while italian.

2020-03

2020-03-30 - Local communities: Germany has now got more than 50,000 products. Danke schön!
2020-03-25 - Special operations: Operation zutaten launch. It's dealing with products which ingredients are wrongly stored as french while german.

How to spread the world?

We should frequently publish these news.

1. Twitter: some news are ready to tweet, don't hesitate.

2. On #general channel on ou slack space. Example:

Some weekly news about Open Food Facts:

2020-10-04 - Design - @Adam J has posted an interesting home page redesign to be discussed. Just have a look.
2020-10-03 - Products - @ggozlan with his app Foodbowel took thousands pics of kosher products in Paris. Thanks to @Seb, it's now online and help is needed to complete the data!

(Find past news and add your own on the wiki!)