A free nutrition API gives an app or website calorie and nutrient data without anyone building a food database by hand. It’s what lets a diet app log a meal, a recipe site show nutrition facts, or a grocery tool look up a product by its barcode.
This guide covers what to look for and lists every food and nutrition API on the public-apis list, sorted by what each one does.
This post is part of my free API series. The full list of categories is in the free API directory.
What food and nutrition APIs can power
- A calorie and macro tracker that logs meals by name or barcode.
- Nutrition facts on recipe pages.
- Meal plans with a shopping list.
- Food recall alerts for things people have bought or logged.
- A drink or beer list for a bar or brewery site.
How to choose a free nutrition API
- Know where the data comes from. Government data like the USDA’s FoodData Central is carefully measured. Crowd-sourced databases like Open Food Facts cover far more packaged products but can have mistakes.
- Check coverage for your customers. Many databases lean toward one country’s products. Test with foods your users actually buy.
- Look at the terms for showing data. Some require attribution, and some limit how you can store or display results.
- Be careful with health claims. Nutrition data is information, not medical advice. Say so in your app.
Barcodes, text, and photos
There are three common ways people log food. Barcode lookups are the most accurate for packaged foods. Text lookups, like “two eggs and toast,” are fast and friendly. Photo recognition is the flashiest but the least reliable, so offer a way to correct it. Many good apps combine two of these.
If you’re weighing whether an idea like this should be a web app or a phone app, I wrote about web apps versus mobile apps.
Every food and nutrition API on the list
Each entry says whether you need a key. “No key needed” means you can try it right away. “Sign up for a key” means a free account first, and many of those have paid tiers once you grow. “Users connect their own account” means each person signs in with that service. The APIs come from the community-kept public-apis list, and the descriptions are mine. Services change, so check each one before you rely on it.
Nutrition facts and calorie data
Calories, macros, and nutrients for foods and meals.
- CalorieNinjas: Type a plain sentence like “two eggs and a slice of toast” and get back calories, protein, carbs, and fat. Good for quick food logging. Sign up for a key.
- Edamam: Edamam’s food database and nutrition tools, with recipe search. It powers nutrition data in many well-known apps. Sign up for a key.
- Edamam nutrition: Paste in a recipe’s ingredient list and get full nutrition facts for the dish, including a nutrition label. Sign up for a key.
- Food Info: Nutrition data for millions of foods, combined from six countries’ official food composition databases. Sign up for a key.
- FoodData Central: The USDA’s official nutrient database for US foods, from raw produce to branded products. Free with a key, and the most trusted source for US nutrition data. Sign up for a key.
- Noms: Nutrition data for millions of foods and brands across many countries, with barcodes and product photos. Sign up for a key.
- Nutritionix: A large nutrition database of restaurant, grocery, and common foods, with plain-language logging like “a large coffee with milk.” Sign up for a key.
- RecipeAPI: Recipes with ingredients, cooking steps, and nutrition data together. Sign up for a key.
Beer, wine, and cocktails
- LCBO: Product, price, and store data for the LCBO, Ontario’s government liquor stores. Sign up for a key.
- Open Brewery DB: A free, open list of breweries, cideries, and craft beer bottle shops with addresses and websites. No key needed. No key needed.
- PunkAPI: The published beer recipes from the Scottish brewery BrewDog. Mostly used for coding practice. No key needed.
- Rustybeer: Home-brewing calculators, like alcohol content and bitterness. No key needed.
- TheCocktailDB: A free database of cocktail recipes with ingredients, instructions, and photos. Nice for a bar’s drink menu page. Sign up for a key.
- Untappd: The popular beer check-in app. Its API gives beer, brewery, and check-in data, and each user signs in with their own account. Users connect their own account.
- WhiskyHunter: Statistics from past online whisky auctions, for collectors. No key needed.
Recipes and meal planning
- Edamam recipes: Search millions of recipes by ingredient, diet (like keto or vegan), or allergy, with nutrition for each. Sign up for a key.
- ExactCup: Converts cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons to grams for common ingredients, since a cup of flour and a cup of sugar weigh different amounts. No key needed.
- Racion: Weekly meal plans with grocery prices and shopping lists for many countries. No key needed.
- Spoonacular: A big food API: recipe search, meal planning, grocery products, nutrition, and even wine pairings. Sign up for a key.
- Tasty: Recipes and meal-planning data from BuzzFeed’s Tasty, offered through RapidAPI. Sign up for a key.
- TheMealDB: A free, community-built recipe database with photos, ingredients, and instructions. Sign up for a key.
- Zestful: Turns recipe ingredient lines like “2 cups chopped onion” into structured data: amount, unit, and ingredient. Sign up for a key.
Barcodes and grocery products
Look up packaged foods by barcode, or pull store product data.
- Chomp: Grocery product and food data, including barcode lookups and nutrition. Sign up for a key.
- Kroger: Official Kroger data: products, prices, and store locations, plus shopping carts for signed-in customers. Sign up for a key.
- Open Food Facts: A free, crowd-sourced database of packaged foods from around the world. Look up any product by its barcode for ingredients, nutrition, and allergens. No key needed. No key needed.
Food safety and recalls
- Daily Food Recalls: US FDA and USDA food recalls, merged into one clean feed and updated daily. No key needed.
- openFDA: Public FDA data on food recalls, drug labels, side effect reports, and medical devices. Sign up for a key.
Menus, reviews, and fun extras
Placeholder images, historical menus, and a few just-for-fun ones.
- BaconMockup: Placeholder images of bacon in any size, for mockups before real photos are ready. No key needed.
- Coffee: Random coffee photos, mostly for fun and demos. No key needed.
- Foodish: Random photos of food dishes, mostly for fun and demos. No key needed.
- Fruityvice: Nutrition facts and plant family details for common fruits. No key needed.
- Systembolaget: Product and store data for Systembolaget, Sweden’s government-owned liquor stores. Sign up for a key.
- TacoFancy: A community-built collection of taco recipes, for fun. No key needed.
- The Report of the Week: Data from a YouTube food reviewer’s reviews of fast food and snacks. No key needed.
- What's on the menu?: The New York Public Library’s collection of historical restaurant menus, transcribed by volunteers. Fascinating for history and food research. Sign up for a key.
Questions I hear a lot
What is the best free nutrition API?
For US foods, the USDA’s FoodData Central is free, official, and well documented. For packaged foods by barcode, Open Food Facts is free, needs no key, and covers a huge number of products.
Is there a free barcode API for food?
Yes. Open Food Facts lets you look up products by barcode with no key. Noms and Chomp are other options in the list below.
Can I use nutrition data in a commercial app?
Often yes, but each provider has its own terms. Government data is usually the most open. Check attribution and storage rules before you launch.
How accurate is crowd-sourced food data?
Usually good for common products, but mistakes happen. Let users fix entries, and prefer official data where accuracy matters most.
If you’d like a hand
Picking an API and wiring it into a website or small app safely is part of my apps and platforms work. If you have an app idea that needs this kind of data, I wrote about what a custom web app costs, or tell me about it.