Open Food Facts Attribution

Pantry uses product data from Open Food Facts — a free, open, collaborative database of food products built by a global community of contributors.

When you scan a UPC barcode in Pantry and we find a match, the product name, brand, and image you see were contributed by Open Food Facts’ volunteers and licensed under the terms below.

Database license (the database as a whole)

The Open Food Facts database is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0.

Under this license:

• You are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the database.
• You must attribute Open Food Facts as the source.
• Any adapted database you publicly distribute must be licensed under the same ODbL terms (share-alike).

Pantry’s compliance: we attribute Open Food Facts in this document, in the in-app attribution screen (Settings → Open Food Facts Attribution), and via the per-item link shown in each item’s detail view when it has a UPC. Pantry does not publish or redistribute an adapted version of the Open Food Facts database — the local product info cache is a per-device performance cache, not a published dataset.

Individual contents license (single records)

Individual contents of the database (one product’s name, brand, barcode, etc., taken in isolation) are released under the Database Contents License (DbCL) v1.0.

This is the license that covers each piece of product information you see displayed in Pantry’s item detail view.

Product image license

Photos of products contributed to Open Food Facts are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

Important caveat: the photograph is CC-BY-SA, but the subject of the photograph — the packaging design, trademarks, logos, and product names depicted in it — remains the intellectual property of the respective brand owners. CC-BY-SA does not sublicense that brand IP. Pantry displays product images for the convenience of identifying your pantry items; it does not authorize you to reproduce or distribute brand-owned imagery for any other purpose.

How Pantry handles the share-alike obligation

Open Food Facts’ ODbL / DbCL / CC-BY-SA each carry a share-alike obligation: derived work that’s publicly distributed must inherit the same license.

Pantry stays inside the share-alike boundary by:

1. Displaying OFF data to the user with clear attribution. Display use is not a public distribution.
2. Caching OFF data on the user’s own device, in a private SQLite file, scoped to that user’s own subsequent lookups. This is not a redistribution.
3. NOT publishing a queryable copy of the data, NOT bundling a copy of the OFF database into the app binary, NOT sharing the cache between users via iCloud or any other channel.
4. Linking back to the source product page on world.openfoodfacts.org from each item that has a UPC, so users can verify and contribute corrections at the source.

The pantry’s own bookkeeping — quantities, expiration dates, photos you take yourself, household membership, tag assignments — is your data, produced by you, and not subject to OFF’s share-alike. Only the OFF-sourced fields carry their license obligations.

Contributing to Open Food Facts

Pantry does not currently submit user-created data (corrections, new products, new photos) back to Open Food Facts. If you’d like to contribute, the Open Food Facts mobile app and website accept submissions directly.

Note that submissions to Open Food Facts are:

• Public — your contributions are visible on openfoodfacts.org and available via their API.
• Irrevocable — once contributed, your data is licensed under the licenses above and cannot be unilaterally withdrawn (others may already have copies).
• Attributed to your Open Food Facts contributor name (anonymous if not signed in).

Questions

For questions about Open Food Facts itself, contact them at contact@openfoodfacts.org.

For questions about how Pantry uses their data, contact us at mjlyco@mjlyco.com.