Open Data
Where our product information comes from, and how to get the same data we use.
Last updated: September 2026
The short version
- •When you scan a product barcode, the name and details come from Open Food Facts.
- •It is a free, open database maintained by volunteers, not by us.
- •We keep our own copy so that scanning is fast and your device does not have to contact them.
- •We publish that copy back, under the same licence we received it.
Where the data comes from
Product information in QRbolt comes from Open Food Facts, a collaborative database of food, cosmetics, pet food and other products, built and maintained by volunteers and available to everyone.
We are grateful for it. If you find a product missing or wrong, the best fix helps everyone: contribute the correction directly to Open Food Facts rather than to us, and it will reach every app that uses the data, including this one.
Licences
Three separate licences apply, and they are not interchangeable:
The database
Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0
Covers the database as a collection. Requires attribution and share-alike.
Individual product records
Database Contents License (DbCL) v1.0
Covers the individual facts inside the database.
Product photographs
QRbolt does not copy or adapt images. Your device loads them from Open Food Facts directly.
Our copy, and how to get it
QRbolt keeps a local copy of the Open Food Facts database, refreshed daily, so that scanning is fast and your device does not have to contact them. Under the ODbL that copy is a Derivative Database, and we are required to make it available.
The licence lets us do that by publishing our copy or by describing exactly what we changed. We do the second, because the first would mean handing you a stale snapshot of a database you can get fresher and complete from the source:
1. The original data
Downloaded unmodified from Open Food Facts and its sister projects, and regenerated by them nightly:
- openfoodfacts-products.jsonl.gz (food)
- openbeautyfacts-products.jsonl.gz (cosmetics)
- openpetfoodfacts-products.jsonl.gz (pet food)
- openproductsfacts-products.jsonl.gz (other products)
Kept current with the daily delta files published at static.openfoodfacts.org/data/delta/.
2. Everything we change
This is the complete list. We remove no fields and add no product information of our own.
- The four catalogues are loaded into one table, with a column recording which catalogue each product came from.
- Duplicate barcodes are reduced to one record. The exports contain the same barcode more than once; we keep whichever copy was modified most recently.
- Two character sequences are replaced so the data can be stored at all:
\u0000is removed, and unpaired surrogate characters become the Unicode replacement character. This affected 19 records out of 4.7 million. - A timestamp is added recording when we last refreshed each record.
If you would rather have our copy directly than reproduce it, email support@qrbolt.com and we will provide it under the ODbL.
What this means for your privacy
Because we keep our own copy, scanning a barcode does not tell Open Food Facts anything about you. Your device asks QRbolt, and QRbolt answers from its own database.
One exception, stated plainly: product photographs are loaded by your device directly from Open Food Facts. We do not copy or host their images, so when a product picture appears, their servers see that request. Everything else about the lookup stays with us.
See our Privacy & Data page for how the rest of the app handles your information.