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(Update Q3 2024 – This blog post was originally published in Q2 of 2022 and has been updated to reflect the latest changes in the food API landscape. While many of the original options are still valuable, some have been updated or are no longer actively maintained. We’ve added new APIs that have gained popularity in the food and nutrition app development space. The information provided is based on the latest publicly available data, but it’s always recommended to verify API availability and functionality directly with the provider before implementing them in your projects.)
A food API may analyze recipe costs and nutritional values, classify foods into allergens, compute meal plans, etc.
Because healthy eating is not always easy, an increasing number of mobile users are turning to food and nutrition apps to help them stay on track with their health journeys.
Food and nutrition apps in 2022 are no longer just collections of recipes, meal plans and energy values, though. Users are looking for deep personalization – to their ideological beliefs, their specific micro-nutritional needs, their health issues, possible allergies and intolerances, and food product availability.
That’s where the latest Food APIs come in. Below, we have collected 18 of the latest, most widely used and popular food APIs in quarter two, 2022.
Suggestic
The Suggestic Food API allows users to create hyper-personalized meal plans and analyze ingredients. Meal plans can be tailored to individual users’ macronutrient goals, preferences, and restrictions. The meal plan generator then analyzes the user’s goals and selects from over 1,700,000 recipes to create a personalized meal plan.
Useful features
- programmatically generate custom meal plans using predefined diets and micro and macronutrients
- tailor meal plans to individual users’ food preferences and sensitivities
- allow users to substitute recipes within existing meal plans
- access the Developer Console to define custom rulesets and speed up development
- query the USDA FoodData Central database using GraphQL API
- create individual user profiles directly via API to store their details, progress, and goals
- search over 520,000 restaurants and 35,000,000 menu items
- over 5,000 handcrafted premium recipes
- create and save shopping lists
Example
Meal plans consist of individual recipes grouped by the meal planner. Whenever analyzing a recipe, Suggestic’s API will provide you with the following information: recipe name, cooking time, list of ingredients, amounts and units, macronutrients, micronutrients, shopping isles, and cuisine.
Pricing
free up to $4,900/month
Find more about Suggestic, the white label solutions, and the custom plans on their website. Find more information about the Suggestic API here.
Spoonacular
The Spoonacular Food API uses natural language queries to search for recipes that adhere to special diets and dietary requirements (including vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, grain-free, low carb, Paleo, Primal, keto, FODMAP, Whole 30, and more). It also calculates nutritional values, analyzes recipe costs, classifies recipes into types and cuisines, and even computes an entire meal plan. The variety of its features allows developers to create all kinds of different nutrition and food apps.
Useful features
- classify a grocery product
- match recipes to daily calories
- generate meal plan
- classify cuisine
- image analysis and classification
- visualize recipe nutrition, price breakdown, and equipment
Example
The shoppable recipe option allows brands to display recipes that inspire visitors when they browse packaged foods (dips, sauces, wraps…). When the buyers are shown what they can make, they are more likely to purchase.
Pricing
free for basic up to $999/month for mega
Find more about the Spoonacular API on their website here.
GrubHub
The GrubHub Food API is an online food ordering and delivery platform. Originating in Chicago in 2004, it is now available across the US. The web app allows users to search for food delivery options from local restaurants. It lets users search for food based on cuisine types (such as Mexican or Chinese), food type (such as salad, pasta, or burritos), deals (such as lunch deals), and dietary preferences (i. e. vegan, gluten-free).
GrubHub provides a semi-open API that can be used by food providers to update restaurant information, such as addresses, working hours, and cuisine types. The API can also be used to retrieve menu information from their ever-growing database of restaurants (currently over 10 thousand).
Pricing
N/A
Grubhub API does not offer public documentation at the moment, however, interested parties can request app approval by emailing [email protected] or check here for other integration options.
Zestful Data
The Zestful Food API provides a simple recipe parser, turning variously described ingredients into meaningful and easy-to-consume JSON format. For example, 2 cups of finely chopped fresh parsley will be turned into exact quantity, a unit of measure, food product, and preparation steps embedded in that wording.
The strength of this API lies in its simplicity. It can be applied to a myriad of projects where natural language of ingredient description has to be turned into quantifiable and identifiable data.
Useful features
- ingredient parsing with unlimited data retention, zero attribution requirement and no restriction on resale (unlike Spoonacular and Edamam)
- build shopping lists
- make recipes searchable
Pricing
$0.02 per ingredient parsed
Find more about Zestful Data here.
Nutritionix
The Nutritionix Food API is a large database and search engine for nutrition and exercise information. It utilizes natural language to allow users to browse restaurants and food for nutrition information.
Their database of common foods is based off the USDA database, supercharged by their in-house registered dietitian team. This team also works full/time to help verify all the data.
Useful features
- UPC (Universal Product Code) scan
- food search returning nutritional values, brand, etc.
Examples
- Nutritionix have a proprietary app that promises to let users log everything they ate in a day in as little as 60 seconds. That is enabled by their natural language technology. The user can speak or type into the app and the API transforms it into foods and their nutritional values.
- The API can be sent latitude and longitude coordinates, and it will return a list of all nearby restaurants with nutrition data available. Nutritionix have a growing database of over 200 thousand restaurant locations.
Pricing
free up to 1850$/month
Learn more about the Nutritionix API here.
Chomp
The Chomp Food API is a food and nutrition API that provides high-quality data on over 875 thousand grocery products, branded foods, and raw ingredients both in the United States and around the world.
Their database has information on not only ingredients, but also packaging information (size and photos), nutrients (micro and macro), diet labels (vegan, vegetarian, or gluten-free), flagged ingredients, allergens, countries where sold, and more.
Useful features
- barcode lookup
- searching by name and advanced searching with 10+ filters
- searching using a single ingredient or a set of ingredients
Example
Chomp was built by developers for developers, and as such, they are committed to providing resources. Among other useful features, their website offers an interactive query builder here, which lets users and visitors generate calls for the branded food search API endpoint.
Pricing
free up to $299/month
Learn more about Chomp here.
USDA FoodData Central
The USDA FoodData Food API is developed and run by the US Department of Agriculture. It is intended to assist application developers who wish to incorporate verified nutrition data into their apps or websites.
Unlike other APIs on this list, the USDA FoodData Central API provides access to five distinct data sets – Foundation Foods, Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies 2013-2014, National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference Legacy Release, USDA Global Branded Food Products Database, and Experimental Foods.
This API has been available since April 2019 – before, USDA was offering a similar product called USDA Food Composition Databases API.
Useful features
- Food Search endpoint – returns foods that match desired search criteria
- Food Details endpoint – returns details on a particular food
Pricing
free (limited to 3600 requests per hour per IP address)
Find more about the USDA FoodData API here
Open Food Facts
The Open Food Facts Food API is a free database of food products, made by a non-profit association, independent from the industry. It is funded and run by volunteers. Anyone can contribute to the database by scanning products, and anyone can re-use it for any purpose.
The API allows access to an extensive database including product ingredients, nutrition facts, allergens, additives, and to search or filter by product or brand. This information can be accessed by scanning a barcode.
The same team also makes two similar APIs:
- Open Pet Food Facts API for nutrition, ingredient, and allergen information in pet food products
- Open Beauty Facts API for ingredients (including allergens, aluminum salts, and other dangerous chemicals detection), and periods after opening
Pricing
free
Find out more about the Open Food Facts API on their website.
Edamam Food Database
The Edamam Food API provides nutrition analysis tools and applications. They provide access to their huge database of over 900 thousand foods, over 680 thousand unique UPC codes, and over 2.3 million recipes sorted by diets, calories, and nutrients. The database also includes information relating to nutrition for over 40 major diets, and over 200 chronic illnesses.
The app actually provides 3 separate APIs for 3 purposes:
- Nutrition Analysis API that uses Natural Language Processing and semantically structured data.
- Food & Grocery Database API with Natural Language processing
- Recipe Search API which lets users integrate recipes and recipe search into their website or mobile apps.
Example
You can test Edamam’s recipe search and find something to cook based on a specific diet, allergies, and calorie restrictions here.
Pricing
free up to $49 per month (or custom for unlimited) for Nutrition Analysis API / free up to $799 per month for Food & Grocery Database API / free up to $999 per month for Recipe Search API
Find out more about Edamam on their website.
Kroger
The Kroger Food API is a US retails supermarket chain, and this API leverages their data. This includes access to customer profiles, product catalogs, carts, and location-based information.
Find out more about this API here.
BigOven
BigOven is a social network with the aim to make users better, more informed cooks. With a database of over a million recipes, users can query recipes, plan menus, and make shopping lists straight on the BigOven Recipe site.
The BigOven Food API leverages this database of recipes to allow developers access to recipes by title, ingredient, keyword, nutritional information, grocery lists, etc.
Useful features
- search from over 1 million recipes
- build grocery lists from a recipe
- get images that match the recipes
- get reviews and ratings from users who have tried the recipe
Example
BigOven also has a proprietary app (available on Google and Apple) that allows users to make use of the database, get inspired by recipes, make meal plans, and so on
.
The pro version of the app offers interesting features, such as “use up leftovers” which recommends recipes based on leftovers in the fridge or pantry.
Pricing
99$ up to 699$ per month
Learn more about the BigOven Recipe API here.
BARZZ
The BARZZ Food API is a directory of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs in over 60 cities and regions across the US. Their API allows users to retrieve bar and nightclub venue information, such as bar type, location, working hours, amenities, daily specials, etc.
Pricing
free (for up to 5,000 calls per day)
Find out more about the BARZZ API on their website.
Can I Eat It? Barcode Food API allows developers to build their own apps and websites by giving them access to over 80 thousand barcoded products instantly.
Useful features
- search products by name or barcode
- get basic product information
- get Can I Eat It? tasting notes by Martin Isark and his review team
- get detailed nutritional and allergen data
- get vegan/vegetarian/fairtrade status
Example
Pricing
free
Learn more about this API here.
TheMealDB
The MealDb Food API is an open, crowd-sourced database of recipes from around the world. Their database is not as large as some others on this list (it includes 283 meals and images and 574 ingredients) but it has the benefit of being free. It can be used for smaller food or nutrition projects that want to incorporate varied international recipes.
Useful features
- search meal by name
- lookup full meal details by id
- filter by main ingredient or multi-ingredient
- list all categories, areas, ingredients
Pricing
free (certain features are only available to users who support the company by PayPal with 2$ per month or more)
Learn more about TheMealDb API here.
Tasty
The Tasty Food API was developed and trained by API Dojo for Tasty, Buzzfeed’s famous food content website. Tasty (tasty.co) have over 4000 recipes allows users to query about recipes and ingredients. Their own app (Tasty) has had tens of millions of downloads and is one of the most popular recipe content places.
Popular features
- auto-complete recipe suggestions (by name or ingredients)
- list similar recipes by specific IDs
- get recipe details (if available), such as ingredients, nutrition, preparation
Pricing
free for basic (500 requests per month) up to 300$/month (unlimited requests per month)
Learn more about the Tasty API by API Dojo on the RapidAPI website here.
APINinjas – Previously CalorieNinjas
The CalorieNinjas Food API is a simple natural language engine and database of over 100 thousand foods and drinks that extracts nutrition data from any text or image containing text (such as menu or recipe).
Useful features
- providing nutritional information (sugar, fiber, sodium, potassium, fat – saturated and total –, calories, cholesterol, protein, and carbohydrates) from natural language
- providing nutritional information from image containing text
Example
Users can calculate macro and energy nutritional values from text or image containing text straight on the CalorieNinjas website.
Pricing
free (up to 10 thousand API calls/month, no support, no commercial use) up to 49$/month (2 million API calls/month, premium support, commercial use)
Find out more about the CalorieNinjas API on their website here.
TheCocktailDB
The TheCocktailDB Food API is an open, crowd-sourced database of drinks and cocktails (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) from around the world. Developed in 2015 in the UK, TheCocktailDB aims to provide a free data source API for all kinds of drinks, hoping developers would build applications and projects on top of it.
Useful features
- search by ingredient name or cocktail name
- lookup cocktails, full cocktail details, and selections
- filter by category, alcoholic/non-alcoholic, glass type
- list the ingredients, glasses, categories, popular cocktails
Example
a cocktail browser and screensaver for TV
Pricing
free for basic (up to 100 lookups a day) or 2$/month for pro
Learn more about TheCocktailDB API on their website.
FatSecret Platform
FatSecret is a widely used food and nutrition database, trusted by the likes of Amazon, Fitbit, and Samsung. It offers developers to query from a large collection of over 1 million verified food items varying from generic foods to branded products and restaurant items.
Useful features
- integration of curated food, nutrition and calorie data into websites, devices, mobile apps, and other services
Pricing
available upon request, free basic version available (with FatSecret attribution)
Find out more about FatSecret Platform API on their website.