Search for Approved Foods

[jesserosato]

WIC is super specific about what it covers, their site has PDFs full of approved foods. It would be great to get that data in a usable format and provide a search utility for WIC users to be able to see if foods qualify before they go to the store. Ideally, they'd be able to scan UPCs in the store to see if that food qualifies, but that may be overly ambitious...

[marcfarley]

Would something like this help? http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf-to-html/

[jesserosato]

@marcfarley Thanks for the tip! It looks like it could be really helpful. I'll point it out for more research at our next Hack Night (Wednesday at 6pm at Sacramento Hacker Lab if you're interested and in the Sacramento area).

[Elizabethcase]

I used tabula.nerdpower.org to extract the tables. Still need someone to go through by hand and add in foods and details that are listed in the main food file

[Elizabethcase]

Hey, Joseph had a great idea: see if there's an API that connects with UPCs to grab more info about food. Also, we still need a search, woo hoo!

[jesserosato]

@Elizabethcase That's a great idea. It looks like there's a few UPC APIs out there, but it looks like Amazon's is the best free one. I'll add food search to the issues queue once I get the back end pushed up to the repo (hopefully by hack night next week).

[Elizabethcase]

Great -> and just an issue to note here, I need to fix the UPCs because excel auto removed leading zeros

[jesserosato]

@Elizabethcase I think we may have to do the food data in batches. Looking at the CSV, it looks like the different PDFs maybe had different column orders? Or some just are missing columns? I'll bring it up at Hack Night and see if anyone has any good ideas on how to clean this data up.

[Elizabethcase]

Yep. Some have organic, some have packaging, some don't have either. I can set all the blanks to nulls but it's definitely not super clean data

On Sep 22, 2014, at 16:57, Jesse Rosato [email protected] wrote:

@Elizabethcase I think we may have to do the food data in batches. Looking at the CSV, it looks like the different PDFs maybe had different column orders? Or some just are missing columns? I'll bring it up at Hack Night and see if anyone has any good ideas on how to clean this data up.

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[jesserosato]

Yeah, I mean, it is scraped from PDFs, so it's actually pretty great. I think I'm gonna just use the common fields for now, and we'll have to ask CDPH if they can get us clean data at some point.

On Sep 22, 2014, at 7:52 PM, Elizabeth Case [email protected] wrote:

Yep. Some have organic, some have packaging, some don't have either. I can set all the blanks to nulls but it's definitely not super clean data

On Sep 22, 2014, at 16:57, Jesse Rosato [email protected] wrote:

@Elizabethcase I think we may have to do the food data in batches. Looking at the CSV, it looks like the different PDFs maybe had different column orders? Or some just are missing columns? I'll bring it up at Hack Night and see if anyone has any good ideas on how to clean this data up.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.
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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

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[josephlei]

I've been in touch with the WIC team at CDPH last year and then again yesterday.. I have some contacts and will continue to reach out to them regarding their approved UPCs in machine readable format. Don't know if we'll end up using excel but if so, custom formats like 000000000 will add leading zeros as needed.