Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

Posted by joshdickson 4/3/2025

Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database(www.opennutrition.app)

Hi HN!

Today I’m excited to launch OpenNutrition: a free, ODbL-licenced nutrition database of everyday generic, branded, and restaurant foods, a search engine that can browse the web to import new foods, and a companion app that bundles the database and search as a free macro tracking app.

Consistently logging the foods you eat has been shown to support long-term health outcomes (1)(2), but doing so easily depends on having a large, accurate, and up-to-date nutrition database. Free, public databases are often out-of-date, hard to navigate, and missing critical coverage (like branded restaurant foods). User-generated databases can be unreliable or closed-source. Commercial databases come with ongoing, often per-seat licensing costs, and usage restrictions that limit innovation.

As an amateur powerlifter and long-term weight loss maintainer, helping others pursue their health goals is something I care about deeply. After exiting my previous startup last year, I wanted to investigate the possibility of using LLMs to create the database and infrastructure required to make a great food logging app that was cost engineered for free and accessible distribution, as I believe that the availability of these tools is a public good. That led to creating the dataset I’m releasing today; nutritional data is public record, and its organization and dissemination should be, too.

What’s in the database?

- 5,287 common everyday foods, 3,836 prepared and generic restaurant foods, and 4,182 distinct menu items from ~50 popular US restaurant chains; foods have standardized naming, consistent numeric serving sizes, estimated micronutrient profiles, descriptions, and citations/groundings to USDA, AUSNUT, FRIDA, CNF, etc, when possible.

- 313,442 of the most popular US branded grocery products with standardized naming, parsed serving sizes, and additive/allergen data, grounded in branded USDA data; the most popular 1% have estimated micronutrient data, with the goal of full coverage.

Even the largest commercial databases can be frustrating to work with when searching for foods or customizations without existing coverage. To solve this, I created a real-time version of the same approach used to build the core database that can browse the web to learn about new foods or food customizations if needed (e.g., a highly customized Starbucks order). There is a limited demo on the web, and in-app you can log foods with text search, via barcode scan, or by image, all of which can search the web to import foods for you if needed. Foods discovered via these searches are fed back into the database, and I plan to publish updated versions as coverage expands.

- Search & Explore: https://www.opennutrition.app/search

- Methodology/About: https://www.opennutrition.app/about

- Get the iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opennutrition-macro-tracker/id...

- Download the dataset: https://www.opennutrition.app/download

OpenNutrition’s iOS app offers free essential logging and a limited number of agentic searches, plus expenditure tracking and ongoing diet recommendations like best-in-class paid apps. A paid tier ($49/year) unlocks additional searches and features (data backup, prioritized micronutrient coverage for logged foods), and helps fund further development and broader library coverage.

I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and suggestions—whether it’s about the database itself, a really great/bad search result, or the app.

1. Burke et al., 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268700/

2. Patel et al., 2019, https://mhealth.jmir.org/2019/2/e12209/

311 points | 150 commentspage 3

probotect0r 4/3/2025|

I have been looking for something like this! I really like the interface. I wish I could click on the picture to enlarge it, so I can confirm that what I am looking for is what I am looking at. For example, we use 3-4 types of lentils and I am not sure if "brown lentil" in the database is the same brown lentil I have at home. I also really liked that I was able to search for "masoor" and the results showed red lentils; often I don't know the English name for something so it's hard to search.

Also, there is an error on this page for me: https://www.opennutrition.app/search?search=Goya

joshdickson 4/3/2025||

Thank you so much for checking out the project and the bug report. The dataset includes alternate names for each of the non-branded grocery products and those are indexed into the Go-based prefix & full-word search engine that I wrote to answer queries. Sometimes they can be a bit over-prioritized in the search experience, but, I'd still rather have them :)

lm28469 4/3/2025||

> I wish I could click on the picture to enlarge it, so I can confirm that what I am looking for is what I am looking at.

You want to enlarge an ai generated image to know if it matches what you have at home ?

probotect0r 4/3/2025||

I guess I missed where they mentioned their images are AI generated. I assumed they were being pulled from some database.

hombre_fatal 4/3/2025||

You can derive it from the fact that there's no feasible way to get such uniform (and cute) image data for every food item.

Though I want to add that this is a good application of AI image gen since the images are useful for quick visual confirmation that the item is in the same ballpark of the thing that you think it is.

jackblum 4/4/2025||

If you’re into open food datasets, OpenNutrition is worth a look — it’s not as big as Open Food Facts, but the data is cleaner and more focused. This breakdown helped me get a sense of what it offers:

https://thedatabasesearch.com/trade_ad/opennutrition-food-da...

CartwheelLinux 4/3/2025||

Very cool site, great implementation.

Calorie burn is dependent on weight and body fat. Individuals who are x+25kg will burn way more calories than x.

For users who come to this site to supplement their weight loss information might be misinformed in their journey, or worse,use it as a primary source and become discouraged because their idea of calorie loss is a little skewed due to the conservative numbers currently shown.

joshdickson 4/3/2025|

> or worse,use it as a primary source and become discouraged

I would hope these people download the free app so they can actually track their food, which has extensive tooling to track weight trends and expenditure changes over time :). But yes, you should be able to customize the assumptions, I just have about 100 more of these things to add and didn't want to wait longer to see feedback.

hluska 4/3/2025||

I don’t know bud, but when I work with diet and nutrition, I feel like I owe users accuracy more than I deserve feedback. Maybe we have a different sense of ethics.

jsmo 4/3/2025||

Tried searching for "Carrot", took about 4 seconds then displayed "Something went wrong". Dark mode is helpful!

emillykkeg 4/4/2025||

This is really nice. I will bookmark this project! One small thing is that the first letter I type gets deleted on the https://www.opennutrition.app/search page if I type fast. Like pancakes.

ehaveman 4/3/2025||

when i track nutrition i always get stuck on things like "are the values for a chicken thigh with the bone in or out? do i weigh the meat pre-cooked or after i cook it? do i weigh the bones after i'm done eating and subtract that from the initial weight?" im probably overthinking it.

love the look and i'll keep playing with it but right off the bat i ran into a couple issues:

when i start typing on the search box on the home page it eats the first character (so as i type chicken, what shows up in the next screen's search field is just 'hicken'). and when i search for chicken thigh i don't get any results - seems to just stop filtering? when i press enter in the search field when "chicken thigh" is entered i get a "something went wrong" error.

joshdickson 4/3/2025|

Thank you for your kind words and feedback. The search should be better now, and is much better in-app with additional local caching.

I can assure you that you are not overthinking it in terms of figuring that information out. The search experience tries to make it as clear and helpful as possible. If you encounter any situations where it could be more clear, I would love to see them. My contact info is in my bio, or there is a feedback prompt on the site/in-app. Thanks again for checking the project out and your feedback.

robertlagrant 4/3/2025||

It looks good. Do you have a way to differentiate food in different locations? E.g. 500ml Coke in the UK vs US might be different.

(Also I type in Can of coke and it has no results, which is probably an annoying thing to have to map to 330ml Coke, but might be useful on the todo list!)

sputknick 4/3/2025||

I like the concept, but I think a more reliable/less compute intensive way to implement it would be too use AI to call up non -AI data. I could just type in "some red beans and rice" and the LLM parses what I mean, and retrieves stored verified data.

joshdickson 4/3/2025|

That's what OpenNutrition does. However, in many cases, there is no publicly accessible "non-AI data" source to refer to. OpenNutrition tries to bridge the gap, using the public data when available, and providing additional inferred data to fill in the gaps. For "red beans" and "rice", OpenNutrition provides a long list of foods with full citations in public databases. See the "References" section where you can click through to the source material.

Red Beans

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/red-beans-canned-and-dr...

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/red-beans-dry-vIh9Ofhcl...

Rice

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/enriched-white-rice-tlA...

Zealotux 4/3/2025|

Congrats on the launch! Looks slick and reactive. Now I wish there was an app to analyse my meals from pictures and estimate the calories/macros, I guess it exists somewhere but I doubt the accuracy, honestly the only thing I really want from so-called AIs.

andrewchilds 4/3/2025||

There are a few made for people with diabetes that offer macro estimates based on a photo, e.g. https://www.snaq.ai, https://gluroo.com. I'm sure others exist that are for a more general or fitness-minded audience.

achempion 4/3/2025|||

If you'll find an app like this, try to do an experiment: estimate calories by taking a picture, then add 30g of olive oil (270 kcal) to the same dish and see if the app will detect it.

hombre_fatal 4/3/2025||

Heh, and the same goes for using a traditional nutrient tracker for a meal you ordered at a restaurant.

Nutrient/calorie tracking really only works if you measure the raw inputs or use a packaged product that gives you the info, and I imagine those are also the two cases that the AI can estimate visually.

joshdickson 4/3/2025|||

The OpenNutrition app does that :)

Logging foods by image is a great way to get started being accountable with eating, and I'll use it if I'm out and don't want to manually figure out all the different components of something, but it's impossible for even the most well-trained human eye to understand food composition visually. A lot of AI-focused diet apps have gone in this direction as their primary method of input because it removes the need for a database, but the marketing these apps run that this is in anyway accurate as a primary search mechanism is, to me, really borders on abject dishonesty and sets users up for long-term failure. Just because an ingredient is invisible when prepared doesn't mean it's not there.

nqzero 4/3/2025||

any idea how the webapp is written ? eg, what libraries or framework is used

joshdickson 4/3/2025||

Pretty standard Next app on Vercel. Some pre-fetching. Food pages are cached post-generation. Custom go-based search server behind a Cloudflare cache. Any other questions?

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