Food Origins

We're making the global food supply chain tangible.

How?

By creating a tool to help people understand the global supply chain and how it affects them as they shop at their local supermarket. It's an app in which users can take a photo of the barcode on a food product and immediately see the countries from which the ingredients were imported.

Why?

It's easy to show someone a huge set of import and export data, but it's hard for people to translate that into a real understanding of the global food supply network. We want to empower users to discover this for themselves by giving them a tool to visualise the country of origin of each ingredient in the product that they're holding in their hand.

Tech

We used import/export datasets from the USDA's Foreign Agriculture Service (http://www.fas.usda.gov/data) to figure out which country the ingredients in your food come from. We also used LableAPI (http://developer.foodessentials.com/) to discover ingredients given a barcode. Finally, we used python's pandas library extensively for data munging, the web.py module to run our app, the Folium mapping library to map the data and IBM's Bluemix to deploy the app.

Project Information

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