Extend the recognition of packers codes to more countries
The packer code: What we have right now only make sense for french products... I guess that exist some propousal at the European Union level to unify this, but right now, every country follows its own approach. For example, in Spain, you can know the real manufacturer (including the real site where the product is made if the manufacturer have several sites) looking the number "RGSEAA" (Registro General Sanitario de Empresas Alimentarias y Alimentos) (also known before as the RGSA number or something like that) in the product and then searching in the database accasible from: http://rgsa-web-aesan.msssi.es/rgsa/formulario_principal_js.jsp . This database gives you the municipality, province, region and so on. In other few cases the product include the NIF (Number of Fiscal Identification) of the manufacturer, and through other sites you can know the real manufacturer company. Summarizing ;-) the system must be extended to support different manufacturing/packer codes systems existing in different countries. (suggestion from Javichu)
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We are now recognizing the UK * EC codes. See http://madenear.me.uk for a use of those codes!
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Amybeth Hurst, Portland, ME commented
Reading codes has become a huge challenge for many of my friends on special diets. This is a great resource. Thank you, Amybeth Hurst, Portland, ME
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Thanks a lot for the information!
So at this point, you can add a packer code in any format you want. Even if the format is not recognized, it will still be indexed, so you will be able to see all the products from the same packer.
There are two more things I do for the French packer codes:
1. normalization: e.g. emb 64304 a is the same as E64304A.
2. identifying the city and also indexing the city so that we can find all products from a city even if they are from different manufacturers.So what I would suggest is to add all the codes that are on packages. And then we can list them, see what they look like, and try to do extra things like finding the actual name of the company, or its location etc. using publicly available APIs / databases if they exist. (and if they don't exist, we could try to create them)