FoodFacts helping immigrants and refugees shop for Swedish food

Adjusting to different food cultures can be challenging when you’re in a new country, especially at grocery stores. Swedish startup FoodFacts is helping new arrivals independently shop for food in the store through its phone application.

Shoppers can use the app to scan products in the grocery store and get information, including ingredients and nutritional content. You can also learn about the product’s certifications, additives and industrial ingredients.

Users can get info in English and Ukrainian, and FoodFacts has plans to add more languages like Spanish and Arabic later this year.

“Accessible information is a shortcut to faster integration,” FoodFacts CEO Alexandra Ferreira said. “Learning a foreign food culture makes the new life get started easier, faster, and tastier.”

FoodFacts is for anyone who comes to Sweden from another country, especially refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.

The company is aiming to democratize food data and is working to index the contents of all packaged food on the Swedish market. The team is collaborating with several players in the retail sector, and the food data is enriched with several sources in an advanced cloud platform.

FoodFacts says more than 22,500 products have been interpreted and indexed at the ingredient level so far, and are now available for searches and calculations.

“Many of us at FoodFacts have experienced first-hand how difficult it is to orient ourselves in a Swedish grocery store if you don’t know Swedish,” FoodFacts CMO Julian Reiz said. “In the dairy part of the store, it’s a jungle and difficult to know the differences between all the different products.”