Evaluating OCR performance on food packaging labels in South Africa

This study evaluates four open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems which are Tesseract, EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and TrOCR on real world food packaging images. The aim is to assess their ability to extract ingredient lists and nutrition facts panels. Accurate OCR for packaging is important for compliance and nutrition monitoring but is challenging due to multilingual text, dense layouts, varied fonts, glare, and curved surfaces. A dataset of 231 products (1,628 images) was processed by all four models to assess speed and coverage, and a ground truth subset of 113 images (60 products) was created for accuracy evaluation. Metrics include Character Error Rate (CER), Word Error Rate (WER), BLEU, ROUGE-L, F1, coverage, and execution time. On the ground truth subset, Tesseract achieved the lowest CER (0.912) and the highest BLEU (0.245). EasyOCR provided a good balance between accuracy and multilingual support. PaddleOCR achieved near complete coverage but was slower because it ran on CPU only due to GPU incompatibility, and TrOCR produced the weakest results despite GPU acceleration. These results provide a packaging-specific benchmark, establish a baseline, and highlight directions for layout-aware methods and text localization.