Ask HN: Open source food? I'm planning to start a snack food company and would like to make everything transparent and opensource (formulations, manufacturing processes etc) Would like any advice or feedback from those who are involved in the opensource. Are there any concepts or methods that could translate from software? |
I have a couple of reasons:
1. I want to know what crap i put into my body. If I’m going to eat crap, I want it to be my choice and I want to k ow what’s in my food.
2. I have a kid with severe peanut and tree but allergy. 1st such in our family. Now I have to read every package. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is.
On a related topic, you may wish to consider including open sourcing your cross contamination prevention policies (if any) so that those with food allergies can have a clear picture of if they can eat your food safely. If my wife and I are not confident in the (lack of) cross contamination, we don’t let our child eat the food even if there are no tree nuts or peanuts listed.
Before having a kid with such allergies, I thought so many parents were over reacting. I mean, few people my age have them, so it wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. It worries me why the rates of food allergies are so drastically higher. I suspect it has to do with eating more processed foods. I’m not opposed to processed foods, but I’d like to know if/when I’m eating them and what they are.
Yes would release all that information (basically what we know, we want our consumers to know, if they desire)
eg- agree on natural flavours, thats a big pet peeve of mine (I have no idea whether it's vegan or not, most cases am forced into a decision i'm not happy with)
You could conceivably extend this idea to listing sources of ingredients for those that are concerned with ingredient sustainability.
From my point of view the idea would not be to try and replicate the product but to have greater trust in it.
Who is your audience?
Everything else depends on the answer to that question.
Do you mainly want to tell your customers how you make your product? Then start a blog, hire a photographer, and post on Instagram.
Do you want to reach DIY bio hackers? Then put your recipes on Github.
Do you mainly want to share knowledge with other companies in your industry? Then maybe forget the internet and go meet people in real life at a trade fair.
I contribute to a bunch of different Open Source projects, and they all have a very different audience. Some have mostly users that just want to use the product (nobody is interestedin contributing), while more technical projects see more contributions from users. For the former, website and easy install instructions are more important; for the latter Github and API docs are more important.
So the lesson I would take from Open Source: Think of your audience first, and the best way of distribution follows from that.
The audience is mainly other vegan entrepreneurs (or those who want to be) so we can help each other with formulations and industry knowledge. It's a mission driven company End consumers to a minor extent, as I guess some of the formulations are not useful without machinery to make them.
Regarding concepts from software, not sure. Source control is an obvious one for versioning, wikis make good documentation, but those aren't that software-specific...