  In the past decade, digital technologies have started to profoundly influence
healthcare systems. Digital self-tracking has facilitated more precise
epidemiological studies, and in the field of nutritional epidemiology, mobile
apps have the potential to alleviate a significant part of the journaling
burden by, for example, allowing users to record their food intake via a simple
scan of packaged products barcodes. Such studies thus rely on databases of
commercialized products, their barcodes, ingredients, and nutritional values,
which are not yet openly available with sufficient geographical and product
coverage. In this paper, we present FoodRepo (https://www.foodrepo.org), an
open food repository of barcoded food items, whose database is programmatically
accessible through an application programming interface (API). Furthermore, an
open source license gives the appropriate rights to anyone to share and reuse
FoodRepo data, including for commercial purposes. With currently more than
21,000 items available on the Swiss market, our database represents a solid
starting point for large-scale studies in the field of digital nutrition, with
the aim to lead to a better understanding of the intricate connections between
diets and health in general, and metabolic disorders in particular.
