Posted by joshdickson 2 days ago
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 Free, public databases are often out-of-date, hard to navigate, and missing critical coverage (like branded restaurant foods).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/
Incidentally o3-mini-high got the fried breakfast I added to a tracking app this morning within 50 calories!
Also, there is an error on this page for me: https://www.opennutrition.app/search?search=Goya
You want to enlarge an ai generated image to know if it matches what you have at home ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
(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!)