FoodRepo: An Open Food Repository of Barcoded Food Products

In the past decade, digital technologies have started to profoundly influence healthcare systems. Digital selftracking has facilitated more precise epidemiological studies, and in the field of nutritional epidemiology, mobile apps have the potential to alleviate a significant part of the journaling burden by, for example, allowing users to record their food intake via a simple scan of packaged products’ barcodes. Such studies thus rely on databases of commercialized products, their barcodes, ingredients, and nutritional values, which are not yet openly available with sufficient geographical and product coverage. In this paper, we present FoodRepo (https://www.foodrepo.org), an open food repository of barcoded food items, whose database is programmatically accessible through an application programming interface (API). Furthermore, an open source license gives the appropriate rights to anyone to share and reuse FoodRepo data, including for commercial purposes. With currently more than 21,000 items available on the Swiss market, our database represents a solid starting point for large-scale studies in the field of digital nutrition, with the aim to lead to a better understanding of the intricate connections between diets and health in general, and metabolic disorders in particular. Background & Summary Metabolic disorders, such as diabetes or obesity, have become a major public health concern, with increasingly large parts of the global population affected [1, 2]. Nutritional epidemiologists hope to better understand the underlying causes, the potential treatments and prevention strategies by analyzing population and individual patterns through studies that generally rely on surveying dietary habits. Traditional food-intake survey methods are based on questionnaires filled by participants at a given frequency. This frequency is crucial to determine the accuracy of the records and the scope of the research [3]. Multiple-day diet records provide high accuracy, but require a strong motivation and time commitment by the participants. Approaches like multiple / single 24-h recalls involving a specialized interviewer performing surveys in person or at the phone with the participants require less engagement, but pose some issues with missing data, as they rely on short-term memory. Finally, so-called Food Frequency Questionnaires 1 ar X iv :1 80 1. 10 19 5v 1 [ qbi o. Q M ] 2 5 Ja n 20 18 (FFQ), where participants are asked to indicate the frequency of intake of certain foods over long periods of time (typically 1 year), demand minimal participants’ commitment, therefore allowing for large cohort studies on long-term dietary habits. The likelihood of missing or incorrect data, however, increases as they count on participants’ long-term memory. Recent technological advances, and in particular the emergence and almost complete market penetration of smartphones, have offered interesting surveying alternatives. In particular, mobile phones have been successfully deployed in several food-related studies [4], for example using food photography [5–10]. Other research has also explored the possibility of recording dietary habits by asking participants to scan the barcodes of their consumed food [11, 12]. Although further investigations are required to assess self-reporting biases, these advances in nutritional research have triggered the release of mobile apps oriented mainly towards diabetes and weight-loss self-management [13–17], showing the willingness and interest of users to monitor their food intake if it provides potential health benefits. The further expansion of self-monitoring for research and medical purposes relies on comprehensive and continusouly updated food databases. A few databases of barcoded products already exist, for example Open Food Facts [18] or the USDA Food Composition Databases [19]. While they each have their strength, not all of them are openly accessible or, and they often have a limited product coverage, and are often not regularly updated. For Swizterland, we did not find any database whose product coverage was sufficiently high, where the data was completely open, and easily accessible through an API (Application Programming Interface). The last point was particuarly important to us, as APIs are necessary for third parties to dynamically use the data in their products and services. Our approach was therefore to build an openly accessible database of barcoded food products with sufficiently high coverage, acccessible through a stable API. Rather than focusing on a wide geographic range, we focused on a small country (Switzerland) in order to obtain the necessary coverage. The focus on the Swiss market further benefits from the need to support multiple languages from the beginning, thus making the system readily expandable to other countries, which we are now planning to do. Here, we present this system, which we call FoodRepo (https://www.foodrepo.org), a database of barcoded food products, and we describe the data-acquisition framework, its quality control and maintenance. The growing community around FoodRepo and the validation of new products make our database robust, scalable and self-sustainable in the long run. Currently, the FoodRepo database mostly holds products sold in Switzerland, from the main grocery stores in the country. Its international expansion is under development. Any item in the database is accessible through the FoodRepo website (fig. 1-a ) or via our API, described in section Usage Notes. The CC-BY-4 license under which our database is released will allow its exploitation by different type of users, from academic researchers to commercial partners. For instance, a Swiss consumers association is using FoodRepo data in their NutriScan [20] to make the food package information more accessible, and to provide their users with an overall nutritional score. Beyond this specific example, the FoodRepo database opens the way for promising research opportunities in the field of digital epidemiology and personalised nutrition. Notably, we foresee that, through dietary live-tracking, this database can support studies which combine other recent technological developments and new findings in our understanding of the human metabolism. For example, phone-connected devices for continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels have recently been made available to diabetic patients [21, 22], as well as numerous direct-to-consumer devices to estimate glucose levels have appeared on the market. A plethora of other wireless sensors are now also available to record various physiological parameters, marking a new era of ‘high-throughput human phenotyping’ [23]. Studies that would simultaneously track participants’ parameters, food intake, glycemic response and physical activity might provide detailed insights on the variability of individual metabolic responses. Interestingly, one of the factor which has recently been found to account for a large part of this variability is the microbiota [24–28]. Large-scale testing of these hypotheses through self-tracking could contribute to assess the complex metabolic response of the human body to different energy sources. This requires detailed records of food intake that includes nutritional information as well as eating times [29] and food portion sizes [30–32], challenges that FoodRepo contributes to overcome. FoodRepo will also allow researchers to compare packaged food offers across time and geographical areas. Analyses of the database evolution will give interesting indication on the dietary trends and on the overall modification of the nutritive quality of packaged food. Although the database itself does not inform on the buying frequency, the continuous introduction of specific products in the market, and thus in the database, can potentially indicate how retailers react to customer demands and changing dietary habits.