The ideas is that packaging for products should not just have the usual standardised set of nutritional contents, but a QR code* including them directly in an off-line machine readable format.
The concept is that third party apps or standard health apps in a phone can work with these for dieting and general health data. I am sure Slimming World, or Fat Fighters, would love this to include in their apps, for example.
The basic idea is a standard for the product name, the package size (g), the serving size (g), and nutritional information (per 100g) to be included in a simple format that can be easily scanned directly, probably a VCARD style to keep it compact.
Quote from my son... "Getting what you want from subway on MyFitnessPal is a fucking nightmare"... "because cheese"... So Subway receipts that know what you asked for could include the QR code!
But obviously the QR code could ideally include a set of standard allergens as well, or should I say ALLERGENS to fit with current labelling style. Even so, the app could know which you have an issue with and flag it up in nice red flashing text and a klaxon sound when scanned.
Now, if this was a QR code with a link that served a MIME type then it would make sense as a RFC under IETF, but it probably is far better for this to work off-line as well, and actually contain the data. To me that sounds like a European Standards thing or an International Standards thing.
I think we'd be happy to work on the formal definition, after all the list of allergens and standard nutritional information categories already exist - they just need encoding in some simple and well defined format.
The question is, how do we do this? What agency do we poke and how do we progress it?
* I say QR code, i.e. IEC18004 as that seems to have won the battle of 2D codes over IEC16022, which is a shame, but that is not really important here. Let's go for a QR code.
Update:
Someone suggested we propose a specification, so here is a start (here).
