🥦 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.

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

📋 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.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: availableDate, brandName, brandOwner, calories, carbohydrate, dataType, description, detailUrl, fdcId, foodCategory, gtinUpc, householdServingFullText, ingredients, marketCountry, modifiedDate, nutrients, packageWeight, protein, publicationDate, scrapedAt, servingSize, servingSizeUnit, totalFat. 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. 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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💡 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 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.

🆘 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.

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