Bagged and Open Food Facts
An open database of products. Bagged is a record of your own shopping.
Open Food Facts is a collaborative, non-profit database of food products, built by contributors in the way Wikipedia is. Anyone can add a product, photograph its label and enter its ingredients, and the resulting data is published under an open licence for anyone to use.
It also records NOVA groups, which makes it the closest thing here to a shared reference for the same classification Bagged reports. The two are not really competitors. One is a reference work about products in general, the other is a record of one household's shopping.
The short answer
Complementary, and not in competition. Open Food Facts is the better source of truth about any individual product, because it reads the label. Bagged is a measurement of your own basket over time, which a database does not attempt.
Side by side
| Feature | Open Food Facts | Bagged |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A reference database of products. | A record of your own shopping over time. |
| Unit of data | One product, identified by barcode. | One receipt. On the example, 16 lines in a single photograph. |
| Source of the NOVA group | The ingredients list on the label. | Inferred from the product name printed on the receipt. |
| Own brand and loose items | Present where a contributor has added them. | Always present, because they are printed on the receipt. |
| Money | Not in scope. | Line-item spend, and the same basket priced week over week. |
| Licence | Open data, freely reusable. | Your own receipts, private to your account, never sold. |
What Open Food Facts does well
- The data is genuinely open, reusable and auditable, which almost nothing else in this field is.
- It holds real ingredients lists and labels, so a NOVA group there is derived from ingredients rather than inferred from a name.
- It is non-commercial and does not sell the data.
- It covers products from many countries and is used by researchers and other apps.
What it does not cover
- It is a database rather than a diary. It describes products, not what you bought.
- Coverage and completeness depend on what contributors have entered for a given product.
- Items without a barcode, including loose produce and bakery goods, sit outside the model.
- It holds no information about what you paid.
Where the ingredients advantage matters
Open Food Facts has something Bagged structurally does not: the actual ingredients list. A NOVA group derived from a label is on firmer ground than one inferred from twenty characters of till-roll text, and it is worth saying so plainly.
What Bagged trades for that is completeness and effort. It classifies every line of every shop, including the ones nobody would look up, and it costs one photograph a week rather than a lookup per item.
Reference works do not measure change
A database can tell you what a product is. It cannot tell you that you buy it every week, that the pack shrank in March, or that it accounts for a growing share of your bill. Those are properties of a history, and a history is what a run of receipts is.
The NOVA groups themselves are the same four in both places. They are described in the NOVA classification explained.
Common questions
- Does Bagged use Open Food Facts data?
- No. Bagged classifies from the product name printed on the receipt in a single step, because a receipt carries no barcode to look a product up by. Open Food Facts remains a better source for the ingredients of any specific product.
- Is Open Food Facts free?
- It is a non-profit project and its data is published under an open licence. Bagged is a separate commercial product and is not affiliated with it.
- Which gives a more reliable NOVA group?
- For a single packaged product, a group derived from the ingredients list is better founded than one inferred from a name. Bagged accepts that trade in exchange for covering every line of the shop, and records a confidence figure so uncertain calls can be seen.
- Can I look up a product in Bagged?
- No. Bagged is not a product lookup tool. It reports on the receipts you photograph, which is a different job from answering questions about products you have not bought.
See it on your own receipt.
One photo of your shopping receipt shows what share of it was ultra-processed, and where the money went, line by line.
Get the app