Usda Food Nutrition Scraper

What it does

Scrapes food and nutrition data from the USDA FoodData Central API. Search for any food item and retrieve detailed nutritional information including calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrate content. The API covers branded foods, survey foods, foundation foods, and SR legacy foods from the United States Department of Agriculture. Uses the free DEMO_KEY which allows up to 1000 requests per hour, suitable for most scraping needs.

This Apify actor automates the collection of data from a public API or website, extracting structured information and saving it directly into an Apify dataset. It handles pagination automatically where applicable, supports configurable result limits, and includes robust error handling with timeouts on all HTTP requests. The actor is designed for reliability: it validates inputs, applies sensible defaults, and produces a fallback record when no results are found, so your downstream workflows never receive an empty dataset. Built on the Apify SDK with native Node.js 20 fetch for lightweight, fast execution without browser overhead.

Why use it

Manually collecting data from web APIs and websites is tedious and error-prone. This actor eliminates that burden by running in the cloud on the Apify platform, where it can be scheduled, integrated with webhooks, or chained with other actors. Whether you are conducting research, building a knowledge base, monitoring data sources, or feeding data into an analytics pipeline, this actor gives you structured, ready-to-use JSON output with zero browser overhead. It uses lightweight HTTP requests instead of a full browser, which makes it fast and cost-effective. Every request includes a 120-second timeout to prevent hanging, and all string fields are null-checked for data consistency.

Input parameters

• searchQuery (string, required): Food item to search for. Default: "chicken breast".
• maxResults (integer, optional): Maximum number of results to return. Default: 100. Range: 1-1000.

All inputs are validated at startup with sensible defaults applied when values are missing. The actor will log warnings for any misconfigured options and continue with safe defaults rather than failing outright.

Output data

Each item in the output dataset contains the following fields:

• fdcId: USDA FoodData Central unique identifier
• description: Food item description
• dataType: Data type (Branded, Survey, Foundation, SR Legacy)
• brandOwner: Brand owner name for branded foods
• ingredients: Ingredient list
• calories: Energy content (kcal)
• protein: Protein content (g)
• fat: Total fat content (g)
• carbs: Carbohydrate content (g)

All string fields are null-checked; missing values are stored as null rather than undefined.

Example output

{
    "fdcId": 746773,
    "description": "CHICKEN BREAST",
    "dataType": "Branded",
    "brandOwner": "Tyson Foods Inc.",
    "ingredients": "BONELESS SKINLESS CHICKEN BREAST",
    "calories": "110 kcal",
    "protein": "23 g",
    "fat": "1.5 g",
    "carbs": "0 g"
}

Pricing

This actor is priced on a usage basis:

• $0.01 per result returned in the dataset.
• $0.005 per actor start (fixed platform fee).

For example, scraping 500 results would cost approximately $5.005. Apify provides free monthly credits for new users, so you can try the actor at no charge. Actual costs depend on the number of results, API response times, and memory allocation. You can control costs by setting the maxResults parameter to limit the number of results collected per run. For high-volume use cases, consider running the actor on a schedule during off-peak hours to optimize platform resource usage.

More scrapers from brave_paradise

Check out other useful scrapers built by brave_paradise:

• OpenAQ Air Pollution Data Scraper
• Open-Meteo Historical Weather Scraper
• GeoNames Place Search Scraper

Visit the brave_paradise profile on Apify to see the full catalogue of actors.