Building Custom Products: Nutrition Facts Labeling Using Plone
The "Nutrition Facts" product adds functionality to the Creamery's site and makes nutrition information easier to use
On the original Penn State Creamery site, the current flavors of ice cream were managed separately from the nutritional information about those flavors. To make matters worse, the nutritional information was presented as an image of the label on the packaging, in PDF format.
As part of migrating the Creamery to Plone, the Ag Sciences Web Services group created the Nutrition Facts product.
This product added:
- The ability to manage nutritional information as data (e.g. Calories from Fat, Protein)
- Increased findability and accessibility by presenting information as text rather than as an image locked up in a PDF
- The unification of the concepts of "currently in stock" and nutritional information into one "Food" content type
- Additional fields and metadata (e.g. featured item, allergy information) as distinct fields
Data was extracted from the old label images using open source image manipulation and optical character recognition tools, in additional to manual review. This data was then used to automatically create over 150 "Food" objects in the Creamery site.
