FoodSwitch and use of crowdsourcing to inform nutrient databases

Poor diet is now associated with ill health in most countries. Better food choices can be supported by quality labelling. The FoodSwitch app was designed to show consumers at-a-glance nutritional information while supporting the collation of data to drive industry improvements and government policy. By scanning the barcode using a smartphone's camera, FoodSwitch presents an overall nutritional profile of foods to the consumer, and suggests similar healthier alternative products. A crowd-sourcing function was built into FoodSwitch to allow users to send in photos of missing items. FoodSwitch has >700,000 downloads to date, and has been launched in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, South Africa, China and India, with the United States (US) planned for 2017. Crowd-sourcing has resulted in 1 million photos of new food items contributed by users, equating to >100,000 new products being added to the database. A version for hypertension (SaltSwitch), and celiac disease (GlutenSwitch) and filters for sugar, saturated fat and energy have been launched. International interest in technologies supporting FoodSwitch has identified the system as a new method for tracking the global food supply. The huge volume of data crowd-sourced is enabling improvements to the broader food environment by holding industry and government to account for their performance.