TheMealDB Recipe Scraper

Scrape meal recipes from TheMealDB — a free, open database of recipes from around the world.

What does TheMealDB Scraper do?

This scraper extracts detailed recipe information from TheMealDB, including:

• Meal name and ID
• Category (Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Seafood, Pasta, Vegan, etc.)
• Cuisine/Area (Italian, Mexican, Indian, Japanese, French, etc.)
• Full cooking instructions
• Ingredients list with measurements (parsed into clean arrays)
• Image URL for the meal
• Tags (e.g. Meat, Casserole, Curry)
• YouTube video link for cooking tutorials
• Source URL for the original recipe

How to search

You can search in three ways:

1. Search by meal name

Enter one or more search queries like "chicken", "pasta", "cake". The scraper will find all meals matching each query.

2. Filter by category

Select a food category to get all meals in that group: Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Lamb, Miscellaneous, Pasta, Pork, Seafood, Side, Starter, Vegan, Vegetarian, Breakfast, Goat

3. Filter by cuisine/area

Select a cuisine to get all meals from that region: American, Italian, Mexican, Indian, Japanese, French, Chinese, Thai, British, Greek, and 27 more.

Input example

{
    "searchQueries": ["pasta", "risotto"],
    "maxListings": 20
}

Or filter by category:

{
    "category": "Seafood",
    "maxListings": 30
}

Or filter by cuisine:

{
    "area": "Italian",
    "maxListings": 25
}

Output example

{
    "mealName": "Teriyaki Chicken Casserole",
    "mealId": "52772",
    "category": "Chicken",
    "area": "Japanese",
    "instructions": "Preheat oven to 350 F. Spray a 9x13-inch baking pan...",
    "ingredients": [
        { "ingredient": "soy sauce", "measure": "3/4 cup" },
        { "ingredient": "water", "measure": "1/2 cup" },
        { "ingredient": "brown sugar", "measure": "1/4 cup" },
        { "ingredient": "ground ginger", "measure": "1/2 teaspoon" },
        { "ingredient": "chicken breasts", "measure": "2" }
    ],
    "imageUrl": "https://www.themealdb.com/images/media/meals/wvpsxx1468256321.jpg",
    "tags": ["Meat", "Casserole"],
    "youtubeUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aZr5hZXP_s",
    "sourceUrl": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-26T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Recipe apps — Build a meal planning or recipe search app
• Meal prep tools — Aggregate recipes by category or cuisine for weekly meal plans
• Nutrition research — Analyze ingredients across different cuisines
• Food blogs — Source recipe data for content creation
• Grocery list generators — Extract ingredient lists to build shopping lists
• Cooking education — Collect recipes with video tutorials for learning platforms

Cost

This scraper uses pay-per-event pricing. You are charged $0.005 per recipe result returned. There are no platform fees beyond the per-result charge.

Results	Cost
50	$0.25
200	$1.00
500	$2.50

Limitations

• TheMealDB's free tier API (key "1") is used. Data is sourced from the TheMealDB community database.
• The database contains a curated set of recipes (300+). Not all possible meals are available.
• Search is by meal name substring match. Ingredient-based search is not supported in this scraper.

Integrations

Connect TheMealDB Scraper to any workflow with Apify integrations. Export to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make, GitHub, and more.