Food Database API

A food database API is how you search a catalog you do not host. Calorie API is that API: multi-word search, autocomplete, barcode, and per-100g nutrition, over the 4M+ foods listed on the site. The product page is /food-database-api. This article is the version written for the search "food database API," including the limit people skip: you cannot take the database with you.

Query, then stop

curl "https://api.calorieapi.com/api/v1/search/foods?q=oat+milk&limit=20" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

limit tops out at 100 on an authenticated search. The free plan caps a response at 20 foods. Filters cover brand, category, and nutrients. verified_only=true keeps unverified rows out. Suggest is the lighter call for a dropdown. Food details by id is the record you store.

Barcode lookup uses the same nutrition shape and falls through to Open Food Facts when we do not have the UPC or EAN. A code neither side knows is HTTP 404. That is a signal to search by name, not a broken client.

What you may cache is the foods your users log. Plus allows up to 30 days under the commercial license. Walking page after page of search to build a private mirror is prohibited on every plan. If the business requirement is "we own the file," this is the wrong vendor. USDA publishes reference data you can work from directly. The USDA guide is that path, with its own rate limits and no barcode endpoint.

Price of a query, not of a dump

From pricing on 1 October 2026:

• Free, $0, 1,000 calls a month, 10 per minute, no card, non-commercial.
• Basic, $15, 20,000 calls, 30 per minute, non-commercial.
• Core, $50, 150,000 calls, 50 per minute, non-commercial.
• Plus, $150, 1,000,000 calls, 200 per minute, commercial, with X-API-Usage-Type: commercial.

A food database API that charges in "points," where one search plus the size of the page is not one request, will not match this table. That is Spoonacular. Read Spoonacular API pricing if you also need recipe articles. Read Edamam pricing if you need their nutrition analysis and can live with recipe licenses that accumulate.

The sibling article nutrition database API makes the same no-download rule from the nutrition side. Use one URL as the page you link internally. This one owns "food database API."