Producers team

Team Partnerships

Welcome to the Wiki page about the Team dedicated to seek new partners to increase our impact, and onboard food manufacturers in Open Food Facts! 😊

What is the team Partnerships?

The structure of the community

In order to create a greater impact, the community of Open Food Facts has been structured by skills.

When a group of volunteers is interested and working on the same topic, we call this group a team.

If you're new to Open Food Facts and are interested in joining a team, please fill up the Contributor Skill Pool Form. 💪

About the team Partnerships

Open Food Facts' main goal is to be the largest possible open database for food products, and to be accessible by the largest number of consumers.

To help us towards this mission, we can rely on multiple partners:

• 🏭 Food manufacturers and retailers Yes! To enrich the database, we can count on contributors... but also on food manufacturers! Indeed, as they are the source of the data, which often means that they are able to provide good quality data, and in bigger volumes than manual individual contributions.
• 💻 Product catalogues (also called "PIM" for Product Information Management). They provide a digital solution to food manufacturers to help them manage their products' information and (most of the time) share it with retailers.
• 📱Food Scanning Apps Today, we work closely with many mobile apps which are reusing our database. They are a key ally as they are working towards the same goal to have a large and high quality database of food products. They regularly send us data, updated by their own users → Win win situation!
• 🔗 Food trade associations are helpful to reach out to several food manufacturers while having one contact point. A commun way to collaborate: they invite us to present Open Food Facts during a webinar, attended by their adherents; or promote our project in their newsletter.
• Other actors can be helpful: consumers associations, research institutes and universities, health/environmental agencies, influencers/bloggers, Open Source projects, food NGO, media, etc.

Our goals in the team Partnerships, are:

1. To encourage more food producers to contribute to Open Food Facts
2. To connect with other relevant stakeholders to increase the impact of Open Food Facts.

Why?

Getting data from food producers ensures we have complete and fresh data on their products.

Reaching out to producers is also a great opportunity to encourage them to become actors of transparency in the food industry, as more and more consumers are requesting it. In most cases, producers are motivated to regain control over public information about their products. More than 3 million visitors are consulting Open Food Facts on a monthly basis, so it is in their interest to present accurate data, and up-to-date product images.

Also, relying on the Pro Platform and its multiple tools and alerts, our role is to nudge producers to improve the quality of their products - both on the nutritional and the environmental aspects. See also The virtuous circle of transparency.

The main activities

1. Identify - This stage consists of identifying partners that would be relevant for the development of Open Food Facts
2. Connect - Getting in touch with the contacts via LinkedIn and/or email.
3. Meet - Time to pitch the project to your contact person, and discuss synergies!
4. Accompany (producers only) - Congratulations! The producer has agreed to share product data 🎉 Now, it is a matter of accompanying the user from the creation of his account on the Pro Platform to the import of the data.
5. Interview (producers only) - This last step consists of meeting producers to collect feedback to improve the Pro platform, and asking them for testimonials for communication purposes.

How to join this team? 👋

The first steps

1. The first thing to do is to fill up the Skill Pool form and register your interest in the team Partnerships.
   
2. You will have an onboarding call with the team leader - a great way to get to know each other and make sure to be on the same page :-)
3. Once integrated into the team, you can decide what you'd like to take on, and you'll be invited to join our monthly meet-up!

Resources and tools

• The Toolkit - where you'll find all the useful documents to start as a member of the team Producers 🙌
• The Forum / Producers' Team - where we discuss topics, ask questions, look for help, etc 💬
• Platform for producers - Cheatsheet

Connect

Find us:

• On our Community messaging app Slack:
  • Useful channels #producers #producteurs-fr #going-global
  • Team referent: @Manon Corneille
• Via email: producers@openfoodfacts.org
• Or set a video call w/ Manon 👋

Looking forward to hearing from you! ☀️

Come and join us to increase your impact on food transparency!