USDA FoodData Central
Authoritative US-government nutrient database with detailed nutrition data for branded and standard-reference foods; free key, 1,000 requests/hour.
FoodData Central is the USDA's official food and nutrient database, covering Foundation Foods, SR Legacy, Survey (FNDDS), and hundreds of thousands of Branded products. The REST API lets you search foods by keyword, fetch one or many foods by FDC ID, and page a list of foods, returning detailed nutrient profiles (protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, etc.), portion sizes, ingredients, and brand metadata. A free API key (via api.data.gov) gives 1,000 requests/hour. Best-in-class for accurate nutrition calculations, recipe nutrient summing, and dietary-analysis skills.
Free tier
Free; data is public domain (CC0 1.0). Sign up for an api.data.gov key (no card). A shared DEMO_KEY works for quick testing at much lower limits.Rate limits
1,000 requests/hour per IP with your own key (exceeding it blocks the key for ~1 hour). DEMO_KEY is limited to 30 requests/hour and 50/day per IP. Usage is shown via X-RateLimit-* response headers.Auth
API keyBase URL
https://api.nal.usda.gov/fdc/v1What you'd build with it
- Accurate per-ingredient nutrient calculation for recipes
- Calorie / macro lookup for diet and fitness tools
- UPC/GTIN to branded-food nutrition mapping
- Authoritative reference nutrition for health automations
Key endpoints
- GET
/foods/search?query={q}&api_key={key}Search foods by keyword (also POST with JSON body) - GET
/food/{fdcId}?api_key={key}Fetch full detail for one food by FDC ID - POST
/foods?api_key={key}Fetch details for multiple foods by FDC IDs - GET
/foods/list?api_key={key}Paged list of foods in abridged format
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.