Are there companies that sell access to nutritional information databases that I could subscribe to that a smartphone app could make use of via scanning bar codes and performing certain custom calculations?
April 26, 2011 11:05 AM Subscribe
When someone makes an Android/iPhone app that scans a food product's bar code and returns nutrition information on that food from a database, who made that database? I can see Weight Watchers doing their own, but surely not everybody reinvents the wheel on this every time somebody makes an app that does something similar. Does anyone sell access to such a database? If so, who is that?
I want to make an app for Android phones and iPhones that people would use to scan a food product's bar code and get back certain results based on the food's nutritional information. To do this, it would have to recognize the product by its bar code (nothing new there) and query some mammoth database of food products that included the same nutritional info you see listed on the back of each food package (current apps out there prove that one or more data sources like this already exist).
I can't/won't create such a database myself. But if somebody else offers access to such a database that they maintain and keep current, I'd pay to subscribe to it so my app could access it and then perform its own calculations on that info for a specialized purpose. If by some miracle that database is public and free, well then awesome, but I won't hold my breath.
Someone like Weight Watchers might be big enough to be able to afford to make and maintain their own database, but I'm sure that the smaller or individual makers of other apps that do similar or related things would not reinvent that wheel from scratch each time. Surely there is a third party that maintains a nutritional info database and offers access for a fee.
Do you know who, if anyone, maintains that kind of database and sells access to it?
I want to make an app for Android phones and iPhones that people would use to scan a food product's bar code and get back certain results based on the food's nutritional information. To do this, it would have to recognize the product by its bar code (nothing new there) and query some mammoth database of food products that included the same nutritional info you see listed on the back of each food package (current apps out there prove that one or more data sources like this already exist).
I can't/won't create such a database myself. But if somebody else offers access to such a database that they maintain and keep current, I'd pay to subscribe to it so my app could access it and then perform its own calculations on that info for a specialized purpose. If by some miracle that database is public and free, well then awesome, but I won't hold my breath.
Someone like Weight Watchers might be big enough to be able to afford to make and maintain their own database, but I'm sure that the smaller or individual makers of other apps that do similar or related things would not reinvent that wheel from scratch each time. Surely there is a third party that maintains a nutritional info database and offers access for a fee.
Do you know who, if anyone, maintains that kind of database and sells access to it?
The USDA has a free database: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:22 AM on April 26, 2011 [2 favorites]
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:22 AM on April 26, 2011 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks, Rusty. That's a useful resource and looks awfully close to what I'm after. Maybe it would work on some level, assuming it's queryable via a different channel than the public web interface. But I'm thinking that's not quite it. I'm looking for something that is a specific product associated with a specific bar code. So it might be the Wheat Thins Original Flavor 10oz box, for example, whereas that USDA database might have an entry for "crackers, wheat, regular" and then you pick some amount or another and get the nutrition values for it.
When I see the various apps brag about themselves, they say things like "the largest food database of any app and growing". So that sounds like they're doing their own database. I don't know how they get all the info on all the products in all the stores, but that seems like it would be an insane task and a huge operation that never ended. That's why I was hoping some company did that for a living and sold the results.
posted by Askr at 1:32 PM on April 26, 2011
When I see the various apps brag about themselves, they say things like "the largest food database of any app and growing". So that sounds like they're doing their own database. I don't know how they get all the info on all the products in all the stores, but that seems like it would be an insane task and a huge operation that never ended. That's why I was hoping some company did that for a living and sold the results.
posted by Askr at 1:32 PM on April 26, 2011
Response by poster: Oh awesome, Hades. This is excellent information. Gonna contact 'em. Thanks!
posted by Askr at 10:16 AM on April 27, 2011
posted by Askr at 10:16 AM on April 27, 2011
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posted by Oktober at 11:09 AM on April 26, 2011