Rxbar Barcode
Edilma Howard
RXBAR is voluntarily recalling certain varieties of bars because they may contain undeclared peanuts. People who have peanut allergies run the risk of serious or life-threatening allergic reaction if they consume this product.
People who have purchased affected product and who have peanut allergies should discard the product and contact their local retailer or RXBAR for replacement or a full refund. Consumers can contact the RXBAR consumer service team at in...@rxbar.com or 1-312- 624-8200 Monday through Friday, 8:30am CT - 6pm CT and Saturday and Sunday 10am CT - 1pm CT.
If you're a fan of the RXBAR, with its distinctive packaging listing all of the ingredients and portions of them on the outside of the label, you may want to take note: RXBAR issued a voluntary recall of its bars due to the "potential for the presence of undeclared peanut," per a press release and an email the company sent to customers on Jan. 16. This recent recall is an expansion of a prior recall in December 2018, which included Chocolate Sea Salt and Coconut Chocolate RXBARs, also recalled for potential peanut contamination. Per RXBAR, the company is now expanding the recall out of an "abundance of caution".
"Food safety and quality are our top priority," said RXBAR, in its email to customers. "Our investigation concluded that the issue stems from a specific ingredient supplied by a third party. We immediately changed suppliers for this ingredient when the issue arose." The company's statement continued, "Our investigation concluded that the issue stems from a specific ingredient supplied by a third party. We immediately changed suppliers for this ingredient when the issue arose."
Per RXBAR, the affected flavors include Apple Cinnamon, Blueberry, Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Hazelnut, Chocolate Sea Salt, Coconut Chocolate, Coffee Chocolate, Mango Pineapple, Maple Sea Salt, Mint Chocolate, Mixed Berry, Pumpkin Spice, as well as the RXBAR KIDS flavors Apple Cinnamon Raisin, Berry Blast, Chocolate Chip.
Each of these affected flavors has a separate window for its sell-by dates that are affected by the recall, which RXBAR published in a press release; it also includes the UPC and full descriptions of each product for clarification.
In an email to customers, the brand also noted that potentially affected bars were also sold in the Variety/Sample Pack, KIDS Variety Pack, The Chocolate Pack, Chocolate Duo Pack, Your Top Three Pack, Best Seller Pack, The Anything But Peanuts Pack and Whole30 Pack.
RXBAR iterates that the product is safe to eat if for customers who don't have any sensitivity to peanut products. The company says that people who have purchased the affected products who have peanut allergies should discard it immediately, and that they are able to contact the local retailer they purchased the product from or contact RXBAR directly for a full refund; customers can contact in...@rxbar.com or 1-312-624-8200 Monday through Friday, 8:30am CT - 6pm CT and Saturday and Sunday 10am CT - 1pm CT, per the company's email.
Per RXBAR, any of the bars not mentioned in the recall in those particular flavors and sell-by dates are not affected by the potential for undeclared peanut; those flavors include Gingerbread, Peanut Butter, Peanut Butter & Berries, Peanut Butter Chocolate; the RXBAR KIDS flavors of Double Chocolate, Peanut Butter Chocolate and PB&J; and all of the brand's nut butters. For further clarification on identifying the recalled product, RXBAR has launched a page on its site dedicated to images of the recalled products, along with instructions on where to find the UPC and sell-by dates on each bar. You can access that page on RXBAR's site here.
I started FoodNoms around a year and a half ago. My mission was to build an alternative to MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, Cronometer, LoseIt!, etc. that was fast, well-designed, privacy-oriented, and integrated into the Apple ecosystem.
Even though FoodNoms launched with a limited, US-only database, it managed to attract enough attention and customers to get some traction. I was legitimately surprised this happened. I know the food database is often the main, and sometimes sole, criteria people evaluate when trying food tracking apps.
Still, I knew that in order for FoodNoms to really grow, it would need to provide better solutions to those that do consider the food database a "maker" or "breaker". Six months after I launched FoodNoms 1.0, the FoodNoms Community Database launched, which made it possible for users to submit additions and changes to the regular FoodNoms database.
However, I realized pretty quickly that a lot of my initial assumptions weren't going to hold up. After seven months of learnings, I shipped the first major update to the Community Database last week.
Both the number of foods being submitted every week, and the quality of those foods, far exceeded my expectations. After a few months, I realized that the system I had set up initially was not going to be sustainable, and I needed to find a way to introduce more automation to help out the moderation team.
In order to help my moderation team, I built a warning flag system to detect common errors, like "missing brand name", "calories out of expected range", "iron amount exceeds p99", etc. After observing several months of human moderators be the front line for the Community Database, I felt more confident that these warnings were quite effective and could instead be the "front line of defense" against low-quality submissions.
Today, human moderators are responsible for handling reported issues and going through a backlog of flagged foods. This is a lot more sustainable for the team, and allows user-submitted foods to make it into the Community Database much faster.
I made a design decision with the Community Database that all contributed foods must have a barcode. There must be some unique identifier for each food, so that we can dedupe submissions. I for sure don't want FoodNoms search results becoming polluted with a bunch of garbage results, with no way of being able to verify metadata or nutrition amounts. I know that my customers don't want that either.1
Let's say a user scans a barcode and the app sends a request to the server with barcode "0076580004912". In the database, there isn't a food matching that barcode, so the server returns a 404. But there is a food with barcode "076580004912". See how it's the same exact barcode, minus the extra "0" at the beginning? That's because the food in the database is using UPC-A format, while the request was using GTIN-13 format. GTIN-13 is actually a superset of UPC-A, so in this case, there was an unnecessary barcode lookup miss.
There are a few other cases where barcodes need to be normalized. Sometimes barcode strings contain dashes, or are missing the final checksum digit, or are longer strings that can be trimmed down to GTIN-13.
The previous version of the Community Database allowed reporting issues to foods originating from the USDA, but due to some internal workings of how the database was architected, I wasn't able to accept those fixes into the Community Database.
The "Thank You!" modal also teaches you that when you make a correction, that correction is saved to your library so next time you scan that food item, it will use your correction even before it is moderated/accepted.
Previous versions of FoodNoms were pretty passive with prompting users to log in. There is a dismissable CTA in the "Log Food" screen and an area in the Settings tab. Clearly, these two spots were not doing enough to encourage users to opt in.
This is all fantastic news for FoodNoms. This will have a compounding impact, as I know that if a user successfully scans a barcode within their first day, they are more likely to be retained than a user that logs a food from any other source (i.e. label scanning or searching). More barcode hits = more users retained = more users submitting data = more barcode hits!
A lot of work has gone into this update. Many weekends and late nights. I'm so pleased all that hard work seems to be paying off. It's super exciting to see such positive early results here; it really gives me a new optimism for the future of FoodNoms.
Still a lot of work left to do here, but I think for now I'm going to let some things bake and shift my attention back to new features and marketing efforts. Follow me @ryanashcraft or @food_noms on Twitter to stay tuned. ?
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