Usda Food Data Scraper

Overview

The USDA Food Data Scraper extracts nutritional information from USDA FoodData Central, the official source of food composition data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This actor uses the public FoodData Central API to retrieve detailed nutritional profiles including calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and serving size information for thousands of food items across multiple data types.

Features

• Search for any food item by name across the USDA FoodData Central database
• Retrieve detailed nutritional breakdown including macronutrients and micronutrients
• Filter by data type: Foundation, SR Legacy, Branded, or Survey foods
• Extract up to 30 nutrient values per food item with units and measurements
• Automatic pagination for collecting large result sets
• Uses the official USDA FoodData Central API with built-in rate limiting
• Works with empty input using default search terms (chicken breast, brown rice, avocado)
• Export results in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other formats via Apify datasets

Input Configuration

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
searchTerms	array	Food items to search for	["chicken breast", "brown rice", "avocado"]
maxResults	integer	Maximum results per search term	50
dataType	string	USDA data type filter	"Foundation"

Output Format

Each result contains the following fields:

• foodName - Name of the food item
• fdcId - USDA FoodData Central identifier
• dataType - Data source type (Foundation, SR Legacy, Branded, Survey)
• calories - Energy content in KCAL
• protein - Protein content in grams
• totalFat - Total fat content in grams
• carbohydrates - Carbohydrate content in grams
• fiber - Dietary fiber in grams
• sugar - Total sugars in grams
• sodium - Sodium content in milligrams
• servingSize - Serving size amount
• servingUnit - Serving size unit (g, ml, etc.)
• nutrients - Full JSON array of all available nutrients
• dataSource - Source identification (USDA FoodData Central)
• apiEndpoint - API endpoint used for the query

Use Cases

This scraper is ideal for nutritionists, fitness application developers, food researchers, meal planning services, and anyone building food and nutrition databases. Common applications include building calorie tracking tools, comparing nutritional profiles across food products, analyzing branded food nutrition data, creating meal planning algorithms, and conducting food science research with standardized USDA data.

Pricing

This actor uses a pay-per-event pricing model. You are charged $0.30 per 1,000 results delivered. There are no additional platform fees beyond compute costs.

Limitations

• The USDA DEMO_KEY allows up to 1,000 requests per hour; high-volume users may need their own API key from api.data.gov
• Branded food data may include discontinued or regional products
• Nutrient coverage varies by data type; Foundation foods have the most complete profiles
• Some serving size information may be reported in non-standard units depending on the data source

For more information about running actors on the Apify platform, visit the Apify documentation.