🥦 USDA FoodData Central Scraper

🚀 Export the U.S. national food and nutrient catalog in seconds. Search 1.9M+ foods by name, brand, or category and pull full nutrient profiles, ingredients, serving sizes, and brand details. No registration, no manual CSV wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 25 fields per record · 🥑 1.9M+ foods · 🏷️ 4 data types · 🇺🇸 U.S. national reference

The USDA FoodData Central Scraper exports the official U.S. food composition database maintained by the Agricultural Research Service. Each record returns 25 fields, including FDC ID, description, brand owner, ingredients list, serving size, household measure, food category, and a full nutrient profile (calories, macros, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids).

The catalog spans four data types: Branded foods (private-label products with UPC, brand, and on-label nutrition), Foundation foods (analytically derived nutrient profiles for common ingredients), Survey foods (FNDDS, used in national dietary surveys), and SR Legacy (the classic Standard Reference release). Together they cover everything from "Cheese, Cheddar" to specific store-brand packaged products with full ingredient lists.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Nutrition app builders, dietitians, food research labs, recipe platforms, meal-planning startups, public-health analysts	Food search and autocomplete, nutrient lookup, ingredient matching, calorie calculation, label compliance, dietary research

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📋 What the USDA FoodData Central Scraper does

Four food lookups in a single run:

• 🔎 Keyword search. Find foods by free-text query like chicken breast, oat milk, or chocolate chip cookie.
• 🏷️ Data type filter. Restrict to Branded, Foundation, Survey (FNDDS), or SR Legacy.
• 🏢 Brand owner filter. Pull every product from a specific brand like Kraft Heinz Foods Company or General Mills, Inc..
• 🧬 Full nutrient profile. Each food includes calories, protein, fat, carbs, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and serving conversions.

Each record includes identifiers (FDC ID, UPC), descriptive metadata (description, brand, ingredients, category, market country), serving information (size, unit, household measure, portion list with gram weights), and a compact nutrient array for every nutrient measured.

💡 Why it matters: USDA FoodData Central powers most major nutrition platforms. Building a fresh, structured pull yourself means paginating a search service, joining detail records, and normalizing a sparse nutrient model. This Actor handles all of that and returns a clean per-food row.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded food dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
searchQuery	string	"cheddar cheese"	Free-text food search term.
dataType	array	[]	Subset: Branded, Foundation, Survey (FNDDS), SR Legacy. Empty = all.
sortBy	string	"dataType.keyword"	Sort field: data type, description, FDC ID, or published date.
sortOrder	string	"desc"	Ascending or descending.
brandOwner	string	""	Filter Branded foods by brand owner name.

Example: 50 branded cheddar cheese products.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "searchQuery": "cheddar cheese",
    "dataType": ["Branded"]
}

Example: every Kraft Heinz product across the catalog.

{
    "maxItems": 500,
    "searchQuery": "kraft",
    "brandOwner": "Kraft Heinz Foods Company",
    "dataType": ["Branded"]
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Branded records carry brand owner, UPC, and on-label nutrition exactly as the manufacturer registered them. Foundation and Survey records carry analytically derived values for generic foods. Pick the data type that matches your downstream use (label compliance vs. dietary modeling vs. nutrient research).

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📊 Output

Each food record contains 25 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 fdcId	number	2705709
📝 description	string	"Cheese, Cheddar"
🏷️ dataType	string	"Survey (FNDDS)"
🏢 brandOwner	string | null	"Kraft Heinz Foods Company"
🏷️ brandName	string | null	"Kraft"
🏷️ gtinUpc	string | null	"021000615650"
🧾 ingredients	string | null	"PASTEURIZED MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES..."
🥄 servingSize	number | null	28
📏 servingSizeUnit	string | null	"g"
🥣 householdServingFullText	string | null	"1 slice"
🗂️ foodCategory	string | null	"Cheese"
📅 publicationDate	string	"10/31/2024"
📅 modifiedDate	string | null	"2024-09-15"
📅 availableDate	string | null	"2023-01-01"
🌎 marketCountry	string | null	"United States"
⚖️ packageWeight	string | null	"8 OZ/226 GR"
🔥 calories	number | null	409
🥩 protein	number | null	23.3
🧈 totalFat	number | null	34
🍞 carbohydrate	number | null	2.44
🧪 nutrients	array	[{"name":"Calcium, Ca","unit":"mg","amount":707}, ...]
📦 portions	array	[{"description":"1 slice","gramWeight":21}, ...]
🔗 detailUrl	string	"https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2705709/nutrients"
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-20T22:14:00.000Z"
❗ error	string | null	populated only on failure

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🥦	National catalog. 1.9M+ branded, foundation, survey, and legacy food records.
🧬	Full nutrient profiles. Every food includes calories, macros, vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids in a single compact array.
🏷️	Brand-level filtering. Restrict to a single manufacturer to compare every SKU side by side.
📦	Portion conversions. Each food returns a portion list with gram weights, so you can convert "1 slice" or "1 cup" into grams without a lookup table.
⚡	Fast. 10 foods in under 5 seconds, 10,000 records in under three minutes.
🇺🇸	Official U.S. source. Maintained by USDA Agricultural Research Service and used by every major nutrition platform.
🚫	No keys to manage. No personal token required for the default run.

📊 Accurate food composition data is the foundation of nutrition apps, recipe builders, dietary modeling, and public-health research.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ USDA FoodData Central Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	1.9M+ foods	Live per run	query, data type, brand owner, sort	⚡ 2 min
Build your own pipeline	Free, but engineering hours	Full catalog if you build it	Manual	DIY	🐢 Days
Commercial nutrition APIs	$99-$999/month	Vendor-curated subset	Vendor cadence	Vendor's	⏳ Hours
Manual CSV exports	Free	Stale snapshots	Quarterly at best	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want a clean per-food record with nutrients flattened, brand-level filtering, and no parser to maintain.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the USDA FoodData Central Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Type a food search term, optionally pick a data type or brand owner, set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

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

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💼 Business use cases

📱 Nutrition Apps & Calorie Trackers Food autocomplete with canonical FDC IDs Per-food calorie, macro, and micronutrient lookup Brand-aware product search across millions of SKUs Portion conversion using gram-weight tables	🍽️ Recipe & Meal-Planning Platforms Ingredient matching to USDA descriptions Recipe-level nutrient roll-up from per-ingredient grams Allergen flags from ingredient strings Substitute suggestions within the same food category
🏥 Clinical Nutrition & Dietetics Diet plan builders backed by reference values Therapeutic diet templates (low-sodium, renal, diabetic) Patient-facing food logs with official references Research-grade per-food micronutrient tracking	🧪 Food Research & Public Health Comparative analysis across brand portfolios Population dietary modeling with FNDDS records Reformulation tracking via modified-date diffs Label compliance and ingredient parsing pipelines

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🔌 Automating USDA FoodData Central Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Weekly refreshes keep your downstream food database in sync as USDA adds new branded products and updates nutrient values.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Food composition data powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Nutrition science papers with cited reference values Public-health dietary modeling and policy analysis Coursework in nutrition, food science, and dietetics Reproducible studies with versioned dataset pulls	🎨 Personal and creative Hobby calorie trackers and personal food diaries Indie cooking apps and recipe portfolios Educational content for food bloggers and creators Custom meal planners for athletic or therapeutic diets
🤝 Non-profit and civic School-meal nutrition planning and audits Community-kitchen menu design backed by USDA data Food-bank inventory tagged with macro and micronutrient totals Public-health communications and labeling literacy projects	🧪 Experimentation Train food-classification and OCR-to-nutrient models Prototype agent pipelines that resolve "what is in this dish" Validate ingredient-substitution rules Build dashboards comparing brand portfolios

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Type a food search term in the input form, optionally pick a data type or brand owner, click Start. The Actor pulls matching foods, joins each one with its full nutrient detail, and writes a clean per-food row to the dataset.

📏 How accurate are the nutrient values?

Foundation records carry analytically derived values from accredited labs. Branded records carry the manufacturer's on-label nutrition (subject to labeling tolerances). Survey records are derived from FNDDS for use in national dietary research. Use the dataType field to choose the precision that matches your project.

🔁 How fresh is the data?

USDA updates FoodData Central regularly as branded products are added or reformulated and as new analytical work is published. Every run of this Actor pulls the latest catalog state, so your dataset reflects current values as of run time.

🥦 Can I get every nutrient or only the headline ones?

Every nutrient measured for the food is returned in the nutrients array. Headline values (calories, protein, fat, carbs) are also broken out as top-level fields for convenient sorting and filtering.

🏷️ Can I export every product from a single brand?

Yes. Set brandOwner to the exact manufacturer string (for example Kraft Heinz Foods Company) and restrict dataType to Branded. The Actor will return every SKU that brand has registered.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (daily, weekly, monthly) and keep a downstream food database in sync as USDA publishes new products and nutrient values.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

FoodData Central is a publicly funded U.S. government resource and is free to use, including for commercial products. Review the FoodData Central terms for any project-specific obligations.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from interrupted runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

🧪 What if I need lab-grade reference values?

Filter dataType to Foundation or SR Legacy. Those records are analytically derived and best suited for research-grade calculations.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

USDA FoodData Central Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe food data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh food data into your nutrition app backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture or FoodData Central. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available food composition data is collected.