APIs and integrations
USDA FoodData Central, Open Food Facts, the bulk downloads. For people building or hacking on their own tracker.
Building a calorie tracker app from scratch: architecture overview
An architecture overview for someone building their own self-hosted calorie tracker. Database choice, sync model, search index, mobile client trade-offs, and the things you should not over-engineer at the start.
Nutritionix API: when (if ever) does paying for it make sense?
Nutritionix is the largest commercial nutrition API. It costs money. We compare its restaurant-menu coverage, natural-language parser, and 'Track' API against free USDA + OFF alternatives, and identify the narrow cases where it earns its price.
USDA FDC bulk CSV → Postgres for offline lookups
How to download the USDA FDC bulk CSV files and load them into a local Postgres for offline, unlimited-rate-limit nutrition lookups. Schema, COPY commands, indexes, and a sample query for sub-millisecond barcode resolution.
A 50-line Python calorie tracker against the USDA API
A working command-line calorie tracker in 50 lines of Python that uses the USDA FDC API for food data and SQLite for local storage. Search, log, daily total. The starting point for anyone building their own tracker.
Open Food Facts API tutorial: barcode lookups, contributing back, and the v2 endpoint shape
A practical tutorial on the Open Food Facts API. Barcode lookups, search, the v2 endpoint shape, and how to contribute new products. Plus rate-limit etiquette and the cases where you should use the bulk dataset instead.
USDA FDC: Foundation vs SR Legacy vs Survey vs Branded — which to query when
FoodData Central is five datasets behind one API. Each has a different shape, a different update cadence, and a different right answer to give you. We map them to the queries you actually want to run.
USDA FoodData Central API: getting started
A practical introduction to the USDA FoodData Central API. How to get an API key, what each endpoint returns, the rate limits, and a working curl + Python example for searching the database.