Help Open Food Facts stay afloat

💛 Support the infrastructure that makes this project possible.

Goal: to fund 12 months of infrastructure

Please note that Open Food Facts is an organisation independent of the food industry. If you are a food company, we cannot accept donations from you. However, you are still welcome to share your product data with us in the spirit of transparency! Please contact us at: producers@openfoodfacts.org 

For donations of over €2,000, please contact us at: contact@openfoodfacts.org

We’re often described as the Wikipedia of food, or even as THE global collaborative project in this field.

As a digital public good, we provide everything we produce free of charge. We have no shortage of projects and we manage to secure dedicated funding. But one aspect is particularly difficult to fund: the technical infrastructure.

But what is infrastructure?

Every time you scan a product, our servers search through 4.4 million entries, calculate the Nutri-Score, the Green-Score and the degree of processing, retrieve the photo, analyse the additives and send all this information back to you in a matter of seconds. 

This happens 4 million times a month. Every month. Behind the scenes, there are servers, databases, backups, security systems...

➡️ That’s what infrastructure is: the hidden part of the iceberg!

BUT infrastructure is invisible as long as it works.

-> That is precisely why nobody wants to fund it. (95% of our funding is earmarked for specific projects, not for technical maintenance).

Result:

• Today, our main server is running at three times its normal capacity.

• Risk of major failure

• The technical team spends 30% of its time dealing with incidents.

Consequences:

• Deteriorating response times

• Increasing security risks to data on millions of users’ products

• We are unable to develop projects that make a difference

The cost of all this:

• In 2025, running the Open Food Facts infrastructure cost around €169,660

• In 2026, it will be €172,360, but only 30% has already been funded.

⚠️ We need to find the rest