Another benefit of having many users on a platform like ReciPal (as opposed to nutrition label software just on your computer) is that ingredients can be crowd-sourced and crowd-verified, further improving our search results.

Data Quality

We make a clear distinction between ingredients of varying data quality - whether it's a very reliable ingredient from the USDA database, a verified user-added ingredient, or an unverified user-added ingredient. This distinction also plays a key role in our ingredient search ranking. Below is our simple key for identifying ingredient quality:

A simple key to indicate data quality for our ingredients

Data Verification and Voting

While we can't verify every ingredient that is created on ReciPal, we do our best to look at public ingredients in order to improve search results and ensure high quality recipes and nutrition facts.

To that end, we've added a voting system for users to up and downvote user-created ingredients based on data quality as you can see in the image below.

The score in the middle shows total upvotes minus downvotes, the orange arrow indicates your vote, and the green checkmark indicates a verified ingredient. You can see it live for an ingredient like salted butter.

Ingredient votes on the right

Votes both impact an ingredient's search ranking as well as alert ReciPal staff that we should inspect and verify new ingredients. So, if you want a certain ingredient to be verified, vote on it. That's by far the best way to get our attention.

Parting Words

We're still evaluating the voting system, as it's in early stages, but we're curious what you guys think. Like it, dislike it, have ideas to improve it? Let us know in the comments below.