Open Food Facts: Free Ingredient and Allergen Data for Food Businesses
Open Food Facts is a free, volunteer-built database of packaged foods, a bit like Wikipedia for food labels. You look a product up by its barcode, and the entry can include ingredients, allergens, nutrition facts and photos of the label. Its search tool counted more than 4.8 million products when we checked in October 2026.
Ways to use it this week
- A café or bakery can look up the packaged items it uses or resells (spreads, syrups, snacks) and start a staff allergen cheat sheet. Always check the real label too.
- A small grocery or corner store can look up barcodes to fill in product names and photos for an online shop, instead of typing each one by hand.
- A caterer or meal-prep business can compare the ingredient lists of the brands it buys before switching suppliers.
Try it now (no key): open https://world.openfoodfacts.org/api/v2/product/3017620422003.json?fields=product_name,brands,allergens_tags . That barcode is a jar of Nutella. It returns the product name, the brand ("Nutella, Ferrero") and its listed allergens: milk, nuts and soybeans. You can also just visit world.openfoodfacts.org and type in a barcode or a product name.
Limits and rules
- Reading data needs no key or account. Apps must identify themselves with a custom "User-Agent" label in the form
AppName/Version (ContactEmail). - The limits are 15 product lookups per minute and 10 searches per minute from one internet address. Don't use the search for search-as-you-type boxes.
- For more than a few hundred products, they ask you to download the full data file (CSV or JSONL) instead of calling the API over and over.
- Accuracy is not guaranteed. The terms say the data "can contain errors and must not be used for medical purposes." Never rely on it alone to answer a customer's allergy question.
License and credit: the database is under the Open Database License (ODbL), each entry under the Database Contents License, and product photos under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). If you reuse the data, name the license and credit Open Food Facts with a link to openfoodfacts.org.
Golden Rock can wire a barcode lookup like this into a client's online shop or app.
Who should care: cafés, bakeries, caterers and small grocers who handle packaged food and get asked "what's in this?"