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.

2021-09

2021-09-27 Google Fellowship - Fellows' impact kept accelerating:
- Robotoff- On the ML front, Yana closed the 8 month gap in releasing Robotoff, after extensive refactoring. As a result, Weight, Label and Store extraction are working again, but it's only the tip of much more significant improvements, with more to come as she has begun taking category prediction to the next level.
- Robotoff- Building on Yana's work, and after automating Product Opener, Olivier has started automating the deployment of Robotoff, this will mean more reliable and faster releases of new features, and no more 8 month deployment gap.
- Environment - Eco-Score
  - Eco-Score - improvements to the packaging and origins taxonomies (Pierre) should mean more accurate computations in more languages.
  - Environment - Martin's estimation work proved fruitful, and he has an initial prototype that should enable us to refine environmental impact based on the ingredients.
- Survey - We have deployed the feature survey widely on the apps, and already got a ton of useful feedback. Thanks to Ako and Melanie as well as Eloïse, Barth, Seb and many others for the work on this
- Smoothie - Flutter - We released the initial version of Smoothie on Android and iPhone, making the "Personal Search" and "Personal Scan" features available for the first time on mobile. Work by all the Flutter team (fellows Jasmeet, Slava, Allie, Darren, Greg, Hans, Justin and Kate as well as Marvin and Monsieur Tanuki) is already visible in the release, and even more massive improvements are coming soon. This includes a redesigned navigation, search, scan, and soon product page. Releases for iOS and Android were automated by Pierre, Marvin and Philippe, and will mean fast releases of new features on both platforms.
- UI/UX - the Product and UI team (fellows Cal and Tim but also Pierre, Domenico and Primaël) are continuing researching and designing what's next for Smoothie. We're spending a lot of time on making the knowledge page personalized and knowledgeable, without overwhelming you with information.
Dev - The project is progressively moving to semantic PRs. What are semantic PRs you may ask ? They allow to create lists of changes more easily, to make news bulletins like this one easier to create.
2021-09 Android - The release is still stuck on this migration issue. Help very welcome :)
2021-09 iPhone - The build is broken, and we have a massive storage issue. iOS and Swift expert, your help would be most welcome.
API documentation- The API documentation has been massively refreshed by Pierre, and has a new home thanks to automation work by Olivier and Pierre. Included are new developer use-cases, to implement the Nutri-Score, the Eco-Score or ingredient related features in your own app. We've rewritten passages that were not clear, and you can file issues whenever you'd like an improvement (or do a PR yourself following the instructions)
Product Opener documentation- thanks to automation work by Pierre, documentation of Product Opener is now published regularly
Hunger Games - Hunger Games releases have now been automated by Faufau: more reliable and faster releases of new features, and already, we now have a Country filter, an Eco-Score game, an upcoming nutrition game, a mass validation feature for moderators. Even more features are coming soon, like an exciting filtering revamp.
Producers - Among other imports, we imported the products of French retailer Monoprix. If you'd like to help with producer imports and/or relationship, send a mail to producers@openfoodfacts.org

2021-08

2021-08-13 Google Fellowship - All fellows are already making lasting impact:
- Olivier automated the deployment of Product Opener (the server). This will mean more reliable and faster releases of new features on the web and through the API.
- On the ML front, Yana is getting Robotoff into top shape, by making it easy to develop on your machine and to deploy for testing and release. She's joined by Shu on the same topic.
- The Flutter team (fellows Jasmeet, Slava, Allie, Darren, Greg, Hans, Justin and Kate as well as Marvin and Monsieur Tanuki) has started improving the Smooth App codebase, while the Product and UI team (fellows Cal, Tim and Ako, but also Domenico, Primaël and Pierre) is conducting user surveys, and researching what's next for Smoothie.
- The marketing and partnerships team (Barth, Mélanie, Jen and Eloïse) are working (among other things) on a Country-score card to help us focus our European expansion of the Eco-Score, and see what we need to do next.
- And finally, on the Eco-Score front, Martin is doing exploratory work on individual computations, with very encouraging initial wins.
- And thanks to Laura and Sebastien for the often forgotten yet essential coordination work.
2021-08-10 Taxonomies - We've started mapping the carbon impact of individual ingredients. If you'd like to help Thomas, Arnaud, Pierre and others on the topic, join the #taxonomies channel. We're also looking for help translating the taxonomies in more languages.
2021-08-02 Android - We're nearing release, with increased stability thanks to Vaiton. We still have some issues to solve, PRs to complete, and there's always room for new features and improvements.

2021-07

2021-07-29 Wild School project' - Maxime, Cédric, Ahlem, Soufiane and Valentin in coordination with Tarik, Stéphane and Pierre, worked on a new visualisation engine for the Eco-Score data, as their WildSchool capstone project. It's already helping assess the impact of Eco-Score, and we hope to extend it to other topics.
2021-07-15 iOS - Slava helped fix the build. A few PRs are waiting for review
2021-07-12 'Producers' - We're looking for volunteers to help us translate the presentations for producers into new languages (and possibly making contact)

2021-07-01 Team - As announced previously (see the blog post), 10 Google employees are joining the Open Food Facts team full time for 6 months to work on the Eco-Score and a new Open Food Facts app! #fellowship on Slack.

2021-06

2021-06-14 - Team - Job offer: Open Food Facts is recruiting a full stack developer / French: Open Food Facts recrute un(e) développeur(euse)
2021-06-10 - Presentation - Stéphane made a lightning talk at the Perl Conference to present OFF. slides
2021-06-05 - Podcast about the environment - On World Environment Day, Pierre and Stéphane spoke with Dr Hannah Fry about Open Food Facts' environmental efforts and Google's support in the 6th episode of the Planet Progress podcast. Available now on your favorite platform (Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Stitcher)
2021-06-06 - Android documentation - You want to help with the next release of the Android app? We now have an automated documentation for the Android App, published at https://openfoodfacts.github.io/openfoodfacts-androidapp/

2021-05

2021-08-25 - Open Food Facts is extending the Eco-score throughout Europe, starting with 8 countries. More on the OFF blog
2021-08-25 - Google.org, in addition to the Google Impact Challenge, is giving us the benefit of the Google Fellowship. This will allow 7 Googlers to come and strengthen the permanent and volunteer teams for 6 months to help us improve our artificial intelligence algorithms and our mobile application. More on the OFF blog (French blogpost)

2021-05-24 - Team - Rosheen Naeem started an internship with Open Food Facts through the Outreachy program thanks to the Perl Foundation. Rosheen will be working on improving the code quality of the Perl backend of Open Food Facts.
2021-05-24 - Team - Hugo Delfaut started an internship with Open Food Facts. Hugo will be working on recruiting and supporting manufacturers to get them to open the data of their products, in particular through our platform for producers.
2021-05-14 - Wiki - We have updated the wiki engine and activated the visual editor that eases contribution a lot! No more need to be an expert of the wiki syntax.

2021-04

2021-04-13 - Open Food Facts is a laureate of the Google.org Impact Challenge, to amplify our environmental impact on a European scale, by measuring the environmental impact of food.
2021-04-11 - Computations of the Eco-Score are being extended beyond France. You can help in #ecoscore

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 our slack space. Example:

Some recent 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!)