Food Database

This API provides you with tools to find nutrition and diet data for generic foods, packaged foods and restaurant meals. In addition it employs NLP (Natural Language Processing) which allows for extraction of food entities from unstructured text.

Covered Use Cases

• Search for a food by keyword, food name or UPC/Barcode
• Sourcing of nutrition facts for a given food, including: macro and micro nutrients, allergen labels, lifestyle and health labels
• Search for a food by given nutrient quantity for 28 nutrients
• Seach for foods within a given brand
• With the build in food-logging context on it allows for NLP requests for chat bots and natural language calorie counters

Food Database Requests

Parse requests: https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/parser

Food Database Text Search

The parser access point handles text search for foods as well as filters for the foods like presence specific nutrient content or exclusion of allergens

• Basic food search request returnes database matches for the search string which was submitted.

• There are 40 diet and health labels which can be used to limit the results of the seach
• Edamam also provides over 20 nutrients which can be used to specify nutrient content desired in the food results

UPC or Barcode Search

Allows for search of an item based UPC/Barcode number.

Parser Request

You will use a GET request to access the Parser. Either UPC or ingr should be present for a valid request

When searching by keyword

When using food logging context

If you use the food logging context feature it will modify the NLP response in the the following way
- You can submit items without quantity. We will try to match them and assign quantity to them based on expected serving size
- Only foods ready for direct consumption will be matched – no raw meats, raw dry goods or vegetables which need cooking for example
- Edamam can handle single items and two part compound items only – i.e. “chicken” or “rice AND chicken”. Make sure the URL is incoded properly

Pagination

To obtain the next page, the API user follow the “next” link from the “_links” section in the result JSON, which looks like this:

"_links" : {
    "next" : {
      "title" : "Next page",
      "href" : "https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/parser?..."
    }
}

When searching by UPC

Search by nutrient range

When searching by keyword you can also specify nutrient ranges by adding parameters in the following form:

nutrients[NTR]=RANGE where

NTR is one of: CA, CHOCDF, CHOLE, FAMS, FAPU, FASAT, FAT, FATRN, FE, FIBTG, FOLDFE, K, MG, NA, NIA, P, PROCNT, RIBF, SUGAR, THIA, TOCPHA, VITA_RAE, VITB12, VITB6A, VITC, VITD, VITK1 or ZN;

and

RANGE is in one of MIN+, MIN-MAX or MAX, where MIN and MAX are non-negative integer numbers.

For example:
nutrients[CA]=50+ means minimum 50mg calcium, where ‘50+’ has to be properly encoded as ‘50%2B’
nutrients[FAT]=30 means maximum 30g fat and
nutrients[FE]=5-10 means iron between 5mg and 10mg inclusive

You can combine more then one nutrient ranges in a search requests

Example Parser request

As an example, let’s say we want to find matches in the food database for a red apple. We then need to URL-encode this string. In this case, this means to just replace the spaces with %20,so it becomes “red%20apple” Please note, that the quotation marks aren’t part of the string.
Here is an example using curl:

'https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/parser?ingr=red%20apple&app_id={your app_id}&app_key={your app_key}'

With NLP food-logging turned on:

'https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/parser?nutrition-type=logging&ingr=red%20apple&app_id={your app_id}&app_key={your app_key}'

UPC or Barcode Search
This is a service allowing you to submit a UPC or barcode and find a match for it in the food database.

Here is an example using curl:
'https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/parser?upc={upc code}&app_id={your app_id}&app_key={your app_key}'

Parser Response

Example response to text search

Nutrition Data Requests

Nutrition Requests: https://api.edamam.com/api/food-database/nutrients

In the response to your parser request you receive the a food URI for each database match. Using the food URI and the measure URI which parser provides you can make a request to the ‘nutrients’ acces point. The ‘nutrients’ access points returns nutrition with diet and health labels for a given quantity of the food.

Nutrients Request

The contents of the request must be a JSON object with the following format:

Ingredient

The API return nutritional analysis for the specified ingredient.

Example Nutrients request

You will use a POST request to access ‘nutrients’.

Here is an example using curl:

This will send the food.json file for processing.

Here is the contents of the food.json file:

Nutrients Response

Example Nutrients response

Nutirion

For ‘Nutritional Label Definitions’ consult the table at the bottom of this document

NutrientInfo

Ingredient

Autocomplete Request

Edamam provides a convinient autocomplete functionality which can be used when searching for ingredients.

Path: http://api.edamam.com/auto-complete

The endpoint returns suggestions for the text submitted to it. Here is an example

http://api.edamam.com/auto-complete?q=rou&limit=10&app_id=${YOUR_APP_ID}&app_key=${YOUR_APP_KEY}

Nutrients Codes and units

Nutritional Label Definitions

Nutrition labels are shared by recipes and foods alike. They are assigned by Edamam based on the ingredients contained in the food label for CPG foods and by the basic ingredients of each recipe for recipes.

Types

Composite types are described in terms of their JSON representation.

Throughout descriptions, the following notation is used:

• integer, float, and string stand for the JavaScript primitive types integer, float, and string, respectively
• enum stands for a string field that only takes on values from a pre-defined range (the range is specified where essential)
• T[] stands for an array of objects of type T
• T[*] stands for an object (associative map) whose every field (element) is of type T.