The open crowdsourced database of food prices
Open Prices is a project to collect and share prices of food products around the world. It’s a publicly available dataset that can be used for research, analysis, and more. Open Prices is developed and maintained by Open Food Facts.
There are currently few companies that own large databases of product prices at the barcode level. These prices are not freely available, but sold at a high price to private actors, researchers and other organizations that can afford them.
We are crowdsourcing an open-source dataset of food prices. Prices can be added by users through our web app. Retailers or third-party apps can contribute as well by using our API. A mobile app is in the works and will be available soon.
Open Prices is not only meant to store individual prices, but also consumption baskets, i.e. the list of products that people buy in a single shopping trip. This data is extremely interesting for researchers to analyze food consumption habits.
When possible, we ask contributors to provide a proof of the price, in the form of a photo of the price tag or receipt. This is to make it easier to ensure data quality.
If you are providing a receipt as the proof image, it means you agree to submit your consumption basket to Open Prices. We will anonymize the receipt and make it publicly available, so that it can be used for research purpose. If you don’t want to publicly share your receipt, you can still contribute by taking a picture of the price tag.
The price dataset is licensed under the Open Database License, which means that it can be used for any purpose, as long as you credit Open Prices and share any modifications you make to the dataset.
Images submitted as proof are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Open Food Facts is a non-profit organisation that collects and shares information on food products from around the world. It is a collaborative project that relies on volunteers to collect data. Open Food Facts is the largest open food products database in the world, with over 3.0 million products in 200 countries.
Price information is of paramount importance to understand food systems. It’s a key factor in understanding the cost of food and to promote healthier diets. Opening price data is a way to make it easier for researchers, journalists, and citizens to have a better understanding of how food prices vary geographically and in time.
You can contribute by adding prices to the dataset. You can do so by using our web app, or by using our mobile app (coming soon). An API is also available if you want to integrate Open Prices to your app. You need an Open Food Facts account to contribute. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one here.
The data is available under the Open Database License, which means that it can be used for any purpose, as long as you credit Open Prices and share any modifications you make to the dataset.
The REST API provides a way to easily access the data. The data is also available as 3 gzipped JSONL dumps: prices, proofs, and locations.
You can get in touch with us by sending an email to contact@openfoodfacts.org.
You can support Open Prices by contributing to the project, by sharing it with your friends and family, and by donating to Open Food Facts.
We ask contributors to provide a proof of the price, in the form of a photo of the price tag or receipt, to ensure data quality. We don’t have yet a system to anonymize receipt images automatically, so we don’t want to make them publicly available, as they may contain personal information.
We ask for an OpenStreetMap ID to be able to link the price to a specific shop. This is useful to be able to display the price on a map, and to be able to analyze regional or retailer price differences.
You can contribute prices by using our API. If you want to contribute prices at scale, please get in touch with us at contact@openfoodfacts.org.
For legal and technical reasons, we don’t consider scraping prices from retailers’ websites as a valid way to contribute to Open Prices. We want to make sure that the prices we collect are accurate and up-to-date, and receiving scraped prices from contributors doesn’t allow us to do that.
Price scraping is a considered option in a future version of Open Prices, but it would be done by Open Prices itself so that we can have a proof of the price based on the HTML page.