Data Sources & Attribution

1. Why this page exists

Phorm’s nutrition and exercise features draw on public databases rather than on a catalogue we compiled ourselves. Two of those databases are published under open licences that ask for credit in return. This page gives that credit, names the licences, and links to them, so that anyone using a meal plan or programme built on Phorm can see where the underlying figures came from.

Nothing on this page changes who owns your data. Your clients, their programmes and their check-ins remain yours and theirs; see the Privacy Policy for how those are handled.

2. Nutrition data

Open Food Facts. Branded and packaged food products, including most South African retail products, come from Open Food Facts — a collaborative, open database maintained by volunteers worldwide. That data is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, and individual product entries under the Database Contents License. Where a Phorm meal plan shows the nutrition of a branded product, that content was obtained from Open Food Facts.

Because Open Food Facts is contributed by the public, individual entries vary in completeness and accuracy. Phorm shows the figures as published and does not silently correct them; where a product carries no value for a nutrient, the platform shows that the value is absent rather than showing zero.

USDA FoodData Central. Generic and whole foods, and the detailed micronutrient figures behind them, come from FoodData Central, published by the United States Department of Agriculture. That data is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0, which asks for no attribution. We credit it here because knowing where a number came from is part of being able to trust it.

3. Exercise data

The shared exercise library is seeded from the Free Exercise Database, released into the public domain under the Unlicense. Exercises a coach adds or renames themselves are that coach’s own content and are not shared with other coaches.

4. Reference intakes

Where the platform reports a nutrient as a percentage of a reference intake, the reference used is the adult Nutrient Reference Value published in Annex XIII of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, which South African labelling convention follows. Those figures describe the composition of the food in a plan. They are not a clinical assessment of the person following it, and Phorm does not interpret blood results, diagnose deficiency, or recommend supplementation.

5. What we do not redistribute

Phorm looks up individual food products as coaches search for them and stores those individual results so the same product need not be fetched repeatedly. We do not publish, sell, or otherwise redistribute a copy or extract of the Open Food Facts database, and records drawn from it remain identifiable as such within our systems.

6. Corrections

If a product’s nutrition information is wrong, the durable fix is to correct it at Open Food Facts, where the correction benefits everyone. Coaches can also create their own version of any food inside Phorm, which is private to them and is never overwritten by later updates from a public source.

Questions about this page: info@c-suite.co.za.