Food Open Data Challenge
What was the Food Open Data Challenge?
The Food Open Data Challenge was a part of The Open Data Challenge Prize Series, which was a series of seven challenge prizes to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social challenges. It was funded by the Technology Strategy Board,(now known as Innovate UK) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, now known as the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
What did we do?
The Challenge posed the following question, which it incentivized innovators to solve: How can we use open data to help people eat more healthily, more sustainably and/or have a more secure food chain?
Restaurants and caterers now need to flag if the food they sell contains one or more of 14 allergens such as gluten, crustaceans and peanuts. This challenge gave participants the opportunity to identify new burdens that the regulation would impose on food businesses, making use of the open data that is already available.
Why did we do this?
Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative start-ups lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level.
This series of challenges aimed to galvanise a new community to use open data as the key ingredient in helping solve social problems. The challenges helped SMEs and start-ups to work with data providers, industry experts and business leaders to develop new ways to reuse available data, creating sustainable business opportunities.
This challenge was funded by
Winner – FoodTrade Menu
FoodTrade Menu is a tool used by restaurants and caterers to help them comply with new regulations on transparency of allergens in their food.
Submitted by Ed Dowding, Therese Stowell and Lyndsey Knight.
What open data drives FoodTrade Menu?
- Food Standards Agency allergen alerts
- Food Standard Agency restaurant hygiene ratings
FoodTrade Menu is committed to making data open. The group hopes to release aggregate and anonymised information on retailers and producers used by specific restaurants and food businesses, shedding light on the supply chain.
Impact of the prize
Social impact
Food businesses which sign up for FoodTrade Menu automatically become part of FoodTrade, a networking platform for food buyers and sellers to discover each other. Each restaurant menu becomes a shopping list; the restaurant can discover local suppliers and local suppliers can discover new restaurant customers, driving transparency, local purchasing and sustainability in the supply chain. The service will also hopefully reduce the number of people who get allergic reactions from food.
Sustainability
Food businesses pay a subscription fee for the service. As the service is incorporated into the broader FoodTrade platform there are synergies which mean the two products will support each other.
Development and impact
The team is partnering with a range of sustainable food organisations, including the Soil Association, the Sustainable Restaurant Association and Slow Food, and is working very closely with TiFSIP (The Institute of Open Data Challenge Series Handbook Food Safety, Integrity and Protection).
An evaluation of the ODCS undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that for every pound spent on the ODCS there was likely to be a return to the economy of between £5-£10 after three years. The aggregated economic impacts for the finalists in the Food Challenge suggested that the potential benefits by year three of this challenge, assuming no business failures, would be between: 19 to 35 jobs; £1.9m to £3.1m Gross Value Added (GVA) (in Net Present Value (NPV) terms); and, £89m to £148m social impacts (in NPV terms).
The finalists
-
Vitalfootprint
Vitalfootprint is targeted at food service businesses and their compliance with new and emerging EU legislation relating to allergen, nutrition and provenance information which is accompanied by a consumer-facing app, Eatjoy, available in the Apple app store. The app helps consumers to easily find information about what they are eating.
-
OMYGOODNESS
OMYGOODNESS is a smartphone game for parents and children to use during a shopping trip to make healthier choices.
Who were the challenge judges?
- Heather Savory Independent Chair of the Open Data User Group (ODUG), Member of the Public Sector Transparency Board
- Gavin Starks CEO IcebreakerOne.org & Dgen.net
- Helen Goulden CEO The Young Foundation
- Deborah Williams Owner/Manager ACE
- Bill Thompson Broadcaster
- Maria Bojanowska Head of National Programmes at The British Museum
- Tony Burton, Consultant
