🍳 Meal Recipes Scraper - Categories, Ingredients, Areas

🚀 Pull meal recipes with ingredients, instructions, image, video, area, category, and tags. 6 search modes for any cuisine.

The Meal Recipes Scraper pulls full recipes from TheMealDB open recipe dataset. Output includes the meal name and alternate name, category, area / cuisine, country, tags, image URL, full step-by-step instructions, source URL, YouTube video URL, image source, Creative Commons confirmation, and a structured ingredients array (up to 20 ingredient + measure pairs).

Six search modes in one Actor: free-text name search, browse by category (Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Lamb, Pasta, Pork, Seafood, Vegan, etc), browse by area / cuisine (Italian, Mexican, Thai, Japanese...), browse by ingredient, random meal, and direct lookup by ID. Run a single category to scrape every dessert in the database, or pull random meals for daily inspiration.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Recipe app builders, food bloggers, meal-planning startups, cooking-content marketers, ML datasets for food, hobbyist cooks	Recipe app catalogs, meal-planning tools, ingredient-driven recommendation, what-to-cook bots, food blogs, cooking-vocabulary training

📋 What the Meal Recipes Scraper - Categories, Ingredients, Areas does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Name search. Free-text recipe search across the dataset.
• 🥩 Filter by category. 14 categories: Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Lamb, Pasta, Pork, Seafood, Vegan, Vegetarian, Side, Starter, Breakfast, Goat, Miscellaneous.
• 🌎 Filter by area. 195 cuisines / countries: Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Thai, Indian, French, etc.
• 🥬 Filter by ingredient. Find every recipe using chicken, garlic, parmesan, etc.
• 🎲 Random + lookup. Pull a random meal or fetch by ID directly.

💡 Why it matters: clean, server-side filtering and fresh data on every run.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: area, category, ingredientsText, instructions, mealdbUrl, name, sourceUrl, tagsText, thumbnail, youtubeUrl. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Find the Meal Recipes Scraper - Categories, Ingredients, Areas on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick filters and maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by TheMealDB, its maintainers, or any individual recipe author. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.