🍳 BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper

🚀 Export BBC Good Food recipes to CSV, Excel, or JSON in seconds. No account needed, no coding required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 19 fields per record · 1,700+ results per search · Global coverage

Extract recipes from BBC Good Food with complete data: ingredients, cooking times, difficulty, ratings, nutrition info, dietary tags, and more. Whether you're building a meal planner, training a recipe AI, or researching culinary trends - this scraper delivers clean, structured data instantly.

BBC Good Food is one of the world's largest recipe databases with over 13,000 professionally tested recipes covering every cuisine, diet, and skill level.

Coverage: Recipes for every occasion - weeknight dinners, weekend baking, holiday feasts, quick lunches - filtered by keyword, diet, cuisine, or difficulty. Up to 30 results per search page, paginated to your maxItems limit.

Who uses this	Why
Food tech startups	Dataset for recipe recommendation engines
Nutritionists	Calorie and ingredient analysis at scale
Home cooks	Build personal recipe collections
Data journalists	Food trend research
AI trainers	Fine-tuning recipe generation models
Meal kit companies	Competitor recipe research

📋 What the BBC Good Food Scraper does

• Searches BBC Good Food by keyword, diet, cuisine, or difficulty level
• Fetches full recipe detail pages for each result
• Extracts all structured data from Next.js page state and JSON-LD schema
• Produces clean records with 19 fields per recipe
• Respects rate limits with automatic paging and delays
• Auto-limits to 10 items for free users, up to 1,000,000 for paid plans

💡 Why it matters: BBC Good Food's recipes are professionally tested and editorially curated - this is not user-generated content. The data is research-grade: every recipe has been made, tasted, and rated by real cooks.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	No	10	Maximum number of recipes to collect (free: 10, paid: up to 1,000,000)
searchQuery	string	No	pasta	Keyword to search for recipes
diet	enum	No	-	Dietary filter (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc.)
difficulty	enum	No	-	Difficulty filter (Easy, More effort, A challenge)
cuisine	string	No	-	Cuisine filter (italian, indian, british, etc.)

Simple keyword search:

{
  "searchQuery": "chocolate cake",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Filtered search (vegan + easy):

{
  "searchQuery": "soup",
  "diet": "vegan",
  "difficulty": "easy",
  "maxItems": 100
}

⚠️ Good to Know: BBC Good Food returns up to 30 recipes per search page. The scraper automatically paginates to collect your requested number of items. Diet and difficulty filters apply server-side so you get genuinely filtered results.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🖼 imageUrl	string	Main recipe image URL
📌 title	string	Recipe title
📝 description	string	Recipe introduction
⭐ rating	number	Average star rating (e.g. 4.75)
💬 reviewCount	number	Number of user ratings
👤 author	string	Recipe author name
🎯 difficulty	string	Easy / More effort / A challenge
⏱ prepTime	string	Preparation time (ISO 8601: PT30M)
🍳 cookTime	string	Cooking time (ISO 8601: PT45M)
⏰ totalTime	string	Total time (ISO 8601: PT1H15M)
🍽 servings	string	Number of servings
🔥 calories	string	Calories per serving
🥦 ingredients	array	List of ingredient strings
🥗 diet	string	Dietary tags (e.g. Nut-free, High-protein)
🌍 cuisine	string	Cuisine type (when available)
🏷 category	string	Meal category (Dinner, Lunch, etc.)
🔑 keywords	string	Recipe keywords/tags
🔗 url	string	Source recipe URL
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of scrape
❌ error	string	Error message (if scraping failed)

Sample record:

{
  "imageUrl": "https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/30/2020/08/chicken_pasta_bake-06fe2d6.jpg?resize=440,400",
  "title": "Chicken pasta bake",
  "description": "Enjoy this gooey cheese and chicken pasta bake for the ultimate weekday family dinner. Serve straight from the dish with a dressed green salad",
  "rating": 4.6,
  "reviewCount": 1006,
  "author": "Esther Clark",
  "difficulty": "Easy",
  "prepTime": "PT30M",
  "cookTime": "PT45M",
  "totalTime": "PT1H15M",
  "servings": "6",
  "calories": "575 calories",
  "ingredients": [
    "4 tbsp olive oil",
    "1 onion finely chopped",
    "2 garlic cloves crushed",
    "¼ tsp chilli flakes",
    "2 x 400g cans chopped tomatoes",
    "1 tsp caster sugar",
    "6 tbsp mascarpone",
    "4 skinless chicken breasts, sliced into strips",
    "300g penne",
    "70g mature cheddar grated",
    "50g grated mozzarella",
    "½ small bunch of parsley finely chopped"
  ],
  "diet": "High-protein",
  "cuisine": null,
  "category": "Dinner, Main course, Pasta",
  "keywords": "Cheese, Chicken, Chicken pasta bake, Comfort Food, Esther Clark, Mascarpone, Mozzarella, Pasta, Pasta bake",
  "url": "https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chicken-pasta-bake",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T00:49:45.378Z"
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Details
🥇 Real data from source	Extracted directly from BBC Good Food's Next.js page state - not cached or stale
🥦 Full ingredient lists	Every ingredient string, exactly as written by the recipe author
⭐ Live ratings	Actual user rating averages and review counts at scrape time
🎯 Difficulty + diet tags	Pulled from structured data, not guessed from keywords
🔥 Nutrition data	Calories per serving plus fat, protein, carb breakdown in keywords
🌍 Multi-filter search	Combine keyword + diet + difficulty + cuisine in one run
💾 All export formats	Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, XML from the Apify dataset

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Feature	This Actor	Manual copy-paste	Generic scraper
Structured ingredient list	Yes	No	Rarely
Live ratings	Yes	Yes	Sometimes
Difficulty level	Yes	Yes	No
Dietary tags	Yes	No	No
Nutrition info	Yes	Yes	No
Bulk export	Up to 1M	Not possible	Limited
Search + filter	Yes	Manual	No

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account on Apify (comes with $5 credit)
2. Open the BBC Good Food Scraper on Apify Store
3. Enter your search query, optional filters, and maxItems
4. Click Start and wait a few seconds
5. Download your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Meal planning apps

Build weekly meal plan generators powered by real recipes. Extract prep time, calories, servings, and ingredients to automatically generate shopping lists for any dietary preference.

Food delivery and recipe kits

Identify trending recipe styles - which cuisines are most popular, which ingredients appear most often, what difficulty levels attract the most ratings - to inform your menu development and marketing.

Nutritional research

Aggregate calorie and ingredient data across thousands of recipes to analyse dietary patterns, identify hidden allergens in popular dishes, or compare nutritional profiles by cuisine type.

AI and machine learning datasets

Build training datasets for recipe generation models, ingredient substitution AI, or dietary restriction recommendation systems - with structured, high-quality data from a trusted editorial source.

🔌 Automating BBC Good Food Scraper

Connect this actor to your workflows using Apify integrations:

• Make (Integromat): Trigger a recipe scrape on a schedule and push results to Google Sheets
• Zapier: Auto-populate a meal planning database when new recipes match your search
• Slack: Get a weekly digest of top-rated new recipes in a specific category
• Airtable / Notion: Sync your recipe database automatically

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research and journalism

Track how recipe trends shift over time - which diets are gaining popularity, how calorie counts have changed in featured recipes, which cuisines are being championed.

Creative writing and cookbooks

Use the ingredient and method data as inspiration for your own recipe variations. The structured data makes it easy to identify flavour profiles and technique patterns.

Non-profit and education

Nutrition educators can build learning materials from real recipe data. Community organisations can identify affordable, healthy recipes that fit dietary restrictions.

Experimentation and personal projects

Build your own recipe search engine, a calorie calculator app, or a "what can I make with these ingredients" tool - all powered by real BBC Good Food data.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can use ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant to help you analyse the output:

"Here is a CSV of 500 BBC Good Food recipes. What are the 10 most common ingredients? Which difficulty level has the highest average rating? Which diet tags appear most often in high-calorie recipes?"

The structured data from this scraper is designed to be AI-ready.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Does this require a BBC Good Food account?

No. The scraper uses public recipe pages. No login or subscription is needed.

What is the maxItems limit?

Free users are capped at 10 items per run. Paid plans allow up to 1,000,000 items per run.

How fast is it?

Each recipe takes roughly 300ms to scrape. 100 recipes takes about 30-45 seconds. The scraper respects rate limits to avoid being blocked.

Can I filter by multiple diets?

Currently one diet filter per run. To combine filters, run multiple times and merge the datasets.

What does the diet field contain?

The diet field shows tags from BBC Good Food's own editorial system - things like "Nut-free", "High-protein", "Vegetarian", "Vegan", "Gluten-free". Not every recipe has a diet tag.

Why is cuisine sometimes null?

BBC Good Food only assigns a cuisine to certain recipes. Many classic British dishes and fusion recipes don't carry a cuisine tag. This is accurate to the source.

Are ingredients structured or free text?

Ingredients are returned exactly as written by the author - e.g. "300g penne" or "2 garlic cloves, crushed". They are stored as a JSON array of strings.

What do the ISO time formats mean?

Times use ISO 8601 duration format: PT30M = 30 minutes, PT1H15M = 1 hour 15 minutes. You can parse these with any date library.

Does the scraper handle pagination?

Yes. It automatically pages through search results until it reaches your maxItems count, requesting new pages only as needed.

Can I scrape without a search query?

Yes. If no searchQuery is provided, the scraper defaults to "pasta" as a seed search. Specify your own query for targeted results.

Is this data real-time?

Yes. Every run fetches live data from the BBC Good Food website. Ratings, review counts, and content reflect the current state of each recipe page.

How do I export to Excel?

In the Apify dataset view, click Export and choose XLSX. All fields including the ingredient array will be included.

🔌 Integrate with any app

CSV, Excel, JSON, XML, RSS via Apify dataset export - Google Sheets via Apify integration - Make (Integromat) - Zapier - Slack - Airtable - Notion - MongoDB - PostgreSQL - BigQuery - REST API via Apify dataset endpoints

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for food, travel, finance, and job data scrapers.

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Disclaimer: This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to BBC Good Food or Immediate Media. It accesses publicly available recipe pages for research and educational purposes. Use responsibly and in accordance with BBC Good Food's terms of service.