Food scanner apps (Yuka-style health scores, Open Food Facts' own app, calorie counters) show numbers: nutrients, additives, a grade. Food miles calculators show a single total. Food Odyssey turns a product's ingredient origins into a short animated film of the journey, says plainly which origins are known, estimated or missing, and lets you collect the countries your food came from in a passport.
The data it runs on
Open Food Facts: a free, crowd-sourced database of millions of food products under the Open Database License. We look up a barcode through its public API and read ingredients, manufacturing places and the origins fields.
Limits and gaps: origins are entered by volunteers from the label, and many products list no origins at all. Labels often say "EU / non-EU" instead of a country. Factory location is sometimes only the brand's head office.
How we handle gaps: every leg carries a label: "Label says" (from the pack), "Estimate" (major trade source for that ingredient into that factory's country, from public trade statistics such as UN Comtrade or FAOSTAT, clearly marked), or "Unknown origin". We never draw an unknown as if it were known.
Fallback: a product missing from Open Food Facts gets a "photograph the label" flow: a vision model reads the ingredients and origins, and the user can submit them back to Open Food Facts.
1. The mission
Make the hidden journey of food visible and a little bit magical. Every bar, jar and packet has travelled the world; we want people to see it, collect it, and choose with that in mind.
2. Why people can't resist it
A tiny film about your snack. Fifteen seconds, made for you, ending at your city. It is too charming not to share.
Collecting the world. A passport that fills with countries from your kitchen cupboard: "I have eaten from 23 countries this month."
Surprise. Cocoa from West Africa flying to Belgium and back to Lagos is the kind of fact people repeat at dinner.
3. How it works for real
Scan: on-device barcode reading (the browser BarcodeDetector API or ZXing as a fallback).
Look up: Open Food Facts API by barcode; parse ingredients, origins and manufacturing places.
Resolve places: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) turns free text ("cacao: Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana") into countries and points, then geocodes with an open gazetteer such as GeoNames.
Fill gaps honestly: the same model, given trade statistics, proposes estimated sources, always labelled as estimates.
Film: a template animation engine (SVG or Lottie on the phone) renders the map journey, with captions written by the cheap model. No video model needed, so it is nearly free.
Share: the same template renders to a short MP4 on the server only when the user taps share.
4. Cost per use
Animated templates keep it under $0.01 per scan: one cheap model call for parsing and captions, free Open Food Facts lookups, and the film is drawn on the phone. A rendered share video adds about $0.002 of server time.
Free: unlimited scans and films, the passport. Odyssey Plus ($2 a month): family passports, yearly "where my food came from" recap film, comparisons across a whole shopping basket.
5. Growth loop
Every film ends with the product arriving at the user's city and a "scan yours" link. Friends compare journeys of the same product bought in different countries. Each missing origin invites the user to add it to Open Food Facts, which makes the app better for everyone.
6. Risks and guardrails
Accuracy: estimates are never shown as facts; unknowns stay unknown. Distances are straight-line and labelled as such.
Brands: no brand rankings or "bad company" labels; we show journeys, not verdicts.
Licence: Open Food Facts data is used under its open licence with attribution, and contributions go back under the same terms.
Privacy: scans stay on the phone unless the user shares; no shopping profile is sold.
7. MVP build order
Barcode scan plus Open Food Facts lookup, showing raw origins.
Origin parser with known, estimate and unknown labels.
The 15-second SVG journey film on a simple world map.