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(Q3 2024 update – This blog post was originally published in Q3 2022 and has been updated to reflect the latest changes in the API landscape. While many of the original API options are still valid, some have been updated or are no longer as actively maintained. We’ve added new API services that have gained popularity in the food and recipe 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.)
We explore the best recipe APIs on the market today and list their own unique strengths.
Food and recipe apps have continued to rapidly grow in the past couple of years – from food delivery to food logging to creating meal plans.
Designing an app is no longer reserved for big developers and corporations. There are more and more food and recipe apps run by food and fitness influencers, food brands, functional doctors… that help users make better food choices. Many of them leverage recipe APIs – automated interfaces that store a large number of recipes and can transform user data into personalized meal plans, shopping lists, and so much more.
| API name | Main feature | Link |
| Suggestic | Hyper-personalized meal plans | Suggestic API |
| Spoonacular | Recipes & food products | Spoonacular API |
| MyCookBook.io | Recipe parsing (Unavailable) | MyCookBook.io |
| Edamam | Recipe search & ingredients | Edamam API |
| Zestful Data | Parsing recipe ingredients | Zestful Data API |
| Tasty | Recipes with ingredients & reviews | Tasty API |
| Nutritionix | Nutrition & exercise information | Nutritionix API |
| Nutritics | Specific recipe application to specific business sectors (Unavailable) | Nutritics API |
| ReciPal | Create nutrition fact labels | ReciPal API |
| LogMeal | AI food recognition | LogMeal API |
| TheMealDB | International recipes | TheMealDB API |
| Chomp | Recipe & ingredient barcode search | Chomp API |
| Nutrientizer | Professional Recipe Nutrients API | Nutrientizer API |
Suggestic Recipe API
The Suggestic 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.
Strengths:
- generate hyper-personalized meal plans
- 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 1,700,00 recipes (of those 5,000 handcrafted premium recipes)
- create and save shopping lists
Spoonacular Recipe API
Spoonacular 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 computes a meal plan.
The Spoonacular API is based on a complex food ontology that understands relations between recipes, ingredients, allergens, and nutritional values.
Strengths:
- save and organize recipes from any website
- plan meals
- track food
- collect favorite food products
- access to over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products
MyCookBook is a website that allows direct users to create personalized cookbooks with their favorite recipes found online.
Strengths:
- parse online recipes from any website
- convert recipe to a structured JSON output
Edamam Food Database Recipe API
Edamam 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.
Strengths:
- large database of over 2 million recipes with access to over 5000 top web recipe sources
- search algorithm that returns the most relevant recipes
- semantically organized database, filterable by calorie and diet preferences
- over 35 diet and health filters that allow to develop apps for most popular diets or major health conditions
Zestful Data Recipe API
Zestful 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.
Strengths:
- ingredient parsing with unlimited data retention, zero attribution requirement and no restriction on resale
- build shopping lists
- make recipes searchable
Tasty
Tasty is a digital recipe and cooking platform with a large database of written and guided video recipes. The recipes can be sorted into collections based on the meal (breakfast, snack, lunch, and so on), cuisines, diets, and more. The platform also offers a mobile app where users sign in to save, rate and review recipes, and also integration with devices, such as a smart oven and fridge.
Strenghts:
- a large database of recipes combined with user data, reviews, and ratings
Nutritionix Recipe API
Nutritionix 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 on the USDA database, supercharged by their in-house registered dietitian team. This team also works full-time to help verify all the data.
Strengths:
- UPC (Universal Product Code) scan
- food search returning nutritional values, brand, etc.
Nutritics offer their product to multiple different business sectors – healthcare, sports, foodservice, manufacturers & suppliers, and universities. The application for all different sectors is based on recipe and diet analysis, meal planning, analyzing costs, labeling food, and tracking activity.
Strengths:
- database of over 800,000 international recipes
- analyze recipes and food diaries from your application or platform
- generate a meal plan from your own app or platform
- SmartSearch system that allows users to retrieve a product, recipe, food allergen, and nutrition information
- control Nutritics user data
ReciPal Recipe API
ReciPal is based on the simple premise of creating FDA and CFIA-compliant nutrition fact labels, inventory management, and recipe costing. It also allows users to securely store all the recipe information in the cloud.
Strengths:
- search from ReciPal database
- create your own recipes and ingredients
- create labels in a wide range of styles
- update inventory levels
- get production reports and allow the ingredient lists to be set in descending weight orders automatically
LogMeal Recipe API
LogMeal API is based on an AI system that recognizes food, detects food types, groups, and single or several particular dishes in one photo. Based on the photo, it provides the nutritional information of an ingredient as well the nutritional values of a dish.
Strengths:
- AI food recognition
- determines nutritional values of a recipe from a photo
- lists ingredients in a recipe
TheMealDB Recipe API
TheMealDB 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 benefits from being free. It can be used for smaller food or nutrition projects that want to incorporate varied international recipes.
Strengths:
- search meal by name
- lookup full meal details by id
- filter by main ingredient or multi-ingredient
- list all categories, areas, ingredients
Chomp Recipe API
Chomp 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.
Strengths:
- barcode lookup
- searching by name and advanced searching with 10+ filters
- searching using a single ingredient or a set of ingredients
Nutrientizer API
Nutrientizer is a Professional Recipe Nutrients API, also known as a recipe nutrition calculator API.
Strengths:
- Analyzes recipes to provide detailed nutritional information for each ingredient and the entire recipe.
- Covers a wide range of nutrients including vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids.
- Calculates totals for calories, macronutrients (lipids, proteins, carbohydrates), sugars, fibers, cholesterol, and various fatty acids.