Looking for the maintained version? This post is a snapshot. The food database API comparison page has the full table (eight vendors, eleven attributes), a source link for every cell, a “last verified” date and a quarterly refresh — use it when you are actually choosing. The figures below were reconciled to that page on 2026-09-16.
The landscape
If you’re building a nutrition app, calorie tracker, or meal planner, you need a food database API. But which one? Here’s an honest comparison of the major options in 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure we say so rather than guess.
The contenders
Nutritionix
- Products: 1,266,570 items (1,053,256 grocery, 202,837 restaurant; US and Canada)
- Pricing: Not published — the public free tier has been withdrawn and access starts with a sales form
- Strengths: Dietitian-curated data, NLP food parsing (“1 large banana”), 860 restaurants’ menu items, 92%+ US/Canada barcode coverage claimed
- Weaknesses: No self-serve, no published pricing or rate limits, US/Canada-centric
Best for: Enterprise apps with budget, US/Canada market, apps needing natural language food input.
Spoonacular
- Products: 600K+ grocery products, 115K+ menu items, 5,000+ recipes, 2,600+ ingredients
- Pricing: Free (50 points/day) then from $29/month
- Strengths: Recipe-focused (recipes, ingredients, menu items), nutrition-label widgets, published self-serve pricing
- Weaknesses: American-focused, one-hour cache limit, storing nutrition data is prohibited
Best for: Recipe apps, menu-item data, food-adjacent content.
Edamam
- Products: Close to 900,000 basic foods, restaurant items and packaged goods; 700K–790K UPCs
- Pricing: $14–$299/month, no free plan (30-day trial)
- Strengths: 40+ diet/health/allergen labels, large UPC index (700K–790K codes), restaurant items
- Weaknesses: No free plan, attribution badge mandatory on every plan, images and languages not published
Best for: Diet-specific apps (keto, vegan), allergen-aware features.
FatSecret
- Products: 2.3M+ verified food items, 19,000+ recipes
- Pricing: Free Basic (5,000 calls/day, US-only, attribution); Premier price on request
- Strengths: 90%+ barcode success rate claimed, 58+ countries and 26 languages on Premier, free unlimited Premier for startups under $1M
- Weaknesses: 19 nutrient fields per serving, images and allergens need Premier, per-second limits not published
Best for: Hobby projects, apps needing a free option with decent coverage, multi-country apps that can negotiate Premier.
Open Food Facts
- Products: 4.75M (community-contributed)
- Pricing: Free (ODbL license, attribution + share-alike)
- Strengths: Truly free, global coverage, community-driven, barcode scanning, nightly data dumps
- Weaknesses: 15 product reads and 10 searches per minute per IP (503 above that), no support tier, crowd-sourced data quality
Best for: Open-source projects, research, apps that can tolerate data inconsistency.
Chomp
- Products: 1.2M+ grocery products, branded foods and raw ingredients
- Pricing: $0/month + $0.01/request; Standard $25/month + $0.001/request
- Strengths: Cheapest metered entry, barcode lookup on every plan, raw ingredients
- Weaknesses: Docs were unreachable when we checked, so nutrient fields, images and languages are unverified
Best for: Low-volume US branded-food lookups on a pay-per-request budget.
USDA FoodData Central
- Products: Not published (Foundation, SR Legacy, FNDDS, Branded, Experimental data types)
- Pricing: Free, 1,000 requests/hour per IP; public domain (CC0)
- Strengths: Lab-analysed reference nutrients; the source most others build on
- Weaknesses: US data (plus some New Zealand branded products), no barcode endpoint, no images, no paid tier
Best for: Research, US reference nutrients, offline analysis of the downloadable dataset.
FoodBase (us)
- Products: 6.1M (merged database)
- Pricing: $0–$99/month
- Strengths: Largest merged database (Open Food Facts + USDA + GS1 Bulgaria + Metro Bulgaria), lab-analysed nutrients on USDA Foundation and SR Legacy records, 40+ nutrients per 100 g, multilingual search (6 languages), server-side GTIN normalization, AI vision endpoints (photo → product, label OCR, meal analysis) and AI product summaries on every plan, affordable
- Weaknesses: No natural-language portion parsing (“1 large banana”), no recipe or restaurant data, coverage strongest in Europe/US, young product
Best for: Production apps needing comprehensive food data, barcode scanner apps, photo-based logging, European and US coverage.
Quick comparison
Counts are what each vendor states and count different things; see the maintained comparison for sources.
| Feature | Nutritionix | Spoonacular | Edamam | FatSecret | OFF | Chomp | USDA | FoodBase |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Products | 1.27M | 600K+ | ~900K | 2.3M+ | 4.75M | 1.2M+ | n/p | 6.1M |
| Free tier | None | 50 points/day | No (trial) | 5,000/day (US) | Free | $0 + $0.01/req | 1,000/hour | 100/day |
| Starting paid price | n/p | $29/mo | $14/mo | on request | none | $25/mo | none | $19/mo |
| Barcode lookup | Yes (92%+ US/CA) | Yes (UPC) | Yes | Yes (90%+) | Yes | Yes | GTIN field only | Yes |
| Multilingual | Add-on | en/de | n/p | 26 (Premier) | Yes | n/p | No | 6 languages |
| Nutrient detail | n/p | Macros + micros | 28 (basic foods) | 19 fields | Label values | n/p | n/p (array) | 40+ |
| Attribution | n/p | Free plan only | Every plan | Basic/Premier Free | ODbL | By tier | None (CC0) | See terms |
n/p = not published by the vendor when we checked.
Our take
We built FoodBase because we wanted community-scale coverage with USDA-grade nutrient quality where it exists — at a price indie developers can actually afford. Since launch we’ve added an AI layer that none of the seven vendor pages we checked list: photo-based product recognition, nutrition-label OCR, meal analysis with portion estimates, and plain-language AI product summaries — all metered by a single monthly credit allowance that every plan (including Free) ships with.
If you need NLP food parsing, Nutritionix is your best bet. If you need recipes, go with Spoonacular. If you need zero cost and can live inside the rate limits, Open Food Facts or USDA. But if you need a fast, comprehensive food product database with solid nutrition data — and want photo logging without stitching together a separate vision provider — we think we offer the best value. You can judge the data yourself without an account in the product explorer, and the AI endpoints in the photo playground.
Get started for free — 100 requests/day, no credit card required.
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