Founded by Ebenezer Anifowose, and a proprietary product of Healthcare Nigeria, a social enterprise that promotes health and well-being using audiovisuals, games, and technology, the main aim of the platform is to enable Nigerians avoid fake products and make better food choices.
Information collated on the platform include product name, ingredient list, nutrition facts, NAFDAC number, additives, allergens and typically any other information you will find on food labels.
To build a robust database of food products in Nigeria, FoodFacts is designed as a crowd sourced platform depending on volunteers (contributors) to keep growing the number of food products in its database.
Through the platform, users are able to compare similar brands of food products and choose their preference based on specified criteria, e.g – which type/brand of milk has the less fat and sugar?
They are also able to check-up NAFDAC approved products with their NAFDAC numbers, and make better food choices using a Nutrition Rating System available on the platform. It takes into account sugar, salt, saturated fat, etc, to guide food choices.
Also, the FoodFacts Database contains materials which can be used by students, tutors and researchers for teaching and research purposes around food products, packaging, branding, etc.
According to the founder, the platform will be of immense value to users with allergies; they can easily filter through to get food products meeting their specified criteria.
An added service is FoodFacts’ SME support scheme. “SMEs who do not have barcodes on their food products yet can take advantage of our experience and expertise to standardize their product labeling and packaging” Ebenezer explains.
