Comment by joshdickson

There's an in-depth review of the reasoning for undertaking this project in general and this approach in particular in the Methodology/About section below, see "Current State of Nutritional Data".

Millions of people use food logging apps to drive behavioral change and help adhere to healthy lifestyles. I believe there is immense societal good in continuing to offer improved tools to accomplish this, especially for free, and that's why I created the project and chose to open source the data.

https://www.opennutrition.app/about#current-state-of-nutriti...