Where Our Data Comes From

Every number on FoodData Explorer comes from USDA FoodData Central (FDC), the food composition database published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. We don't run our own lab, survey, or panel — we take USDA's public data and structure it so it's easier to search, compare, and read. This page is a complete, honest account of exactly which parts of USDA's data we currently use, and which we don't.

What's on this site today

• 363 Foundation Foods. These are foods USDA has directly analyzed in its own or contracted laboratories — the most rigorously measured tier of data USDA publishes. Each one carries per-100g values across up to 474 possible nutrients, plus portion-weight data where USDA recorded it.
• 1,882 FNDDS ingredients, representing 122,330 individual nutrient values. FNDDS is USDA's Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies — the ingredient-level nutrient profiles USDA uses to power the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). These are "as consumed" values (for example, cooked rather than raw, where that's how the ingredient is typically eaten).
• 474 nutrients in our master nutrient reference, drawn from USDA's own nutrient list and numbering.
• 28 USDA food categories and 171 federal WWEIA survey categories, which we use to group and classify foods and ingredients on this site.

Nothing above is estimated or written from memory on our end — every figure traces back to a specific USDA record, identified by its own FDC ID. [VERIFY: confirm whether the food/ingredient detail page currently displays the FDC ID and/or a link to the matching fdc.nal.usda.gov record — if not yet shown, either add it before publishing this claim as "linked," or soften this sentence to "recorded in our data" until that's live.]

What's not on this site yet

USDA FoodData Central is larger than what we currently publish. Specifically, we do not yet include:

• SR Legacy — USDA's older, larger Standard Reference dataset, which covers many more everyday foods than our current Foundation Foods set.
• The full FNDDS survey food list — we currently use FNDDS at the ingredient level (see above), not the composed "as reported" survey foods.
• USDA Branded Food Products — packaged, branded foods with label-based nutrition facts.

If you're looking for a specific packaged product and can't find it here, you can search the full USDA database directly at fdc.nal.usda.gov.

How current is this data

USDA updates FoodData Central periodically as new foods are analyzed and existing records are corrected. April 2024 Foundation Foods release.

Verify it yourself

We'd rather you double-check us than take our word for it. USDA FoodData Central is public and searchable at fdc.nal.usda.gov — every food and ingredient on our site corresponds to a specific record there. If a number here doesn't match what you find on USDA's own site, that's a bug on our end, not a difference in the underlying science, contact us at [email protected] and we'll fix it.

Curious how USDA actually arrives at these numbers in the first place — lab-measured versus calculated, and what that distinction means for how much to trust a given value? That's covered in full on our methodology page.