FoodEssentials Data Overview

We’ve had a fair few questions about our data scans so I thought i’d address it in a quick post.  The questions and comments generally fall in to 3 categories.  The scope of the data, the accuracy of the data, and the geographic limitations of the data.

Data Scope:

We presently have a base database of 160k commercially available products and are continually working to increase the size and relevance of this database. At present, it is largely products available in general supermarkets and therefore will rarely, if ever, return results for products in specialty stores such as WholeFoods or Trader Joe’s.  However, we hope to address this by capturing more data.

We have a new catch phrase: ¨ The more you scan the better it’ll get – if you scan a product we don’t have we’ll go out and get it for you¨.  And so we hope to increase the size and relevancy of database by listening to what you are looking for.

Upon launch we had a scan success rate of 58%.  We have made significant improvements to our database over the last 3 weeks and have moved that scan success rate up to 70%.

Data Accuracy:

It is a mammoth task maintaining and such a huge dynamic database that changes all the time.  We have a whole data team that manually manages and analyzes the data on an ongoing basis ensuring accuracy- it’s a thankless task and they do a fantastic job.  In addition, we have developed a host of proprietary processing systems that help us to automatically address the issues of accuracy.

However, due to the ever changing nature of product information there will always be errors and outdated products but we are constantly working to evolve our systems to catch them as early as possible.  At the end of the day we feel the FoodEssentials scanner can be a very useful tool to help you analyze and compare food labels but you must check the food labels yourself before you purchase.

Geographic Limitations of the Data:

Today all the data that we have relates to the US market.  We were hoping that there would be some overlap with the Canadian market but this has proven not to be the case.  With that in mind we do not offer the application in any overseas markets.  We are exploring other data sources and hope to be able to launch in to other markets over the next year.

The more you scan the better it’ll get
- if you scan a product we don’t have, we’ll go out and get it for you.

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