USDA FoodData Central

Directory entry · last reviewed 2026-08-22

Genuinely free rather than free-tier: public domain (CC0), hosted, free API key, no license obligations. It is rate-limited and offers no natural-language meal parsing or barcode product, so you self-integrate, normalize, and maintain everything. No approval gate is documented in the sources we checked, which is not the same as there being none.

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Depending on FoodData Central?

Get an email when the changes tracker gains a dated entry naming it — a deprecation, a deadline, a terms change. Nothing else.

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What we have verified

Category: Nutrition & food data
How it bills developers: Free
What each end user needs: None documented.
What gates your launch: None documented.
Integration effort: Medium — weeks(our rough judgement, not a vendor fact)

Sourced from the page carrying the verified claims, and published as open data in the State of Fitness APIs 2026 dataset (CC BY 4.0). No prices appear here by design — vendor figures move within quarters and most serious tiers are quoted privately.

Everything on this site about FoodData Central

9 pages, grouped by section. A page qualifies when the product is in its title or the question it answers, or it comes up in the body more than once — a single mention in a list is not coverage.

Comparisons

USDA FoodData Central vs Open Food Facts: Which Free Food Data?

Fitness APIs

Alternatives

The Best Nutritionix Alternatives (2026)

Pricing

Build Guides

How to Build a Meal Planning App (2026)

Next steps

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Directory entry, last reviewed 2026-08-22. Access terms, approval processes and membership requirements change — confirm current details in the provider’s own documentation before you commit. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

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