FoodData Central

National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference

FoodData Central publishes 1 API on the APIs.io network: FDC API. Tagged areas include Health and Public APIs.

The FoodData Central catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

FoodData Central’s developer surface includes authentication, documentation, developer portal, signup flow, FAQ, changelog, and 18 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

44.6/100 developing ▬ flat Agent 22/100 agent aware saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-14 · rubric v0.22.0

1 APIs

Health Public APIs

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-14 · rubric v0.22.0

Composite quality — 44.6/100 · developing

Contract Quality 11.3 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 4.7 / 15

Access Clarity 7.9 / 15

Operational Transparency 4.6 / 10

Contract Governance 0.9 / 9

Discoverability 4.3 / 8

Regulatory Posture 3.2 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 22/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 7 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Health regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/fooddata-central: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

APIs 2

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

FoodData Central

National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference

FoodData Central FDC API

endpoints to retrieve nutrient data

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Food Data Central FDC API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Fooddata Central Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Fooddata Central Rate Limits

6 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Fooddata Central Finops

FINOPS

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Fooddata Central Context

14 classes · 39 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

FoodData Central API Rules

6 rules · 4 warnings 2 info

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 3

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

FoodItem

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

FoodSearchCriteria

7 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SearchResult

5 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Examples 3

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Get Food By Fdc Id

4 fields

EXAMPLE

Get Foods Batch

4 fields

EXAMPLE

Search Foods

4 fields

EXAMPLE

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Fooddata Central Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Fooddata Central Domain Security

TLSv1.2 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Fooddata Central Agentic Access

9 operations · 3 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 2

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Portal

Portal

Signup

Signup

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

Access & Security 5

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Authentication

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Operate 5

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Contact

FAQ

ChangeLog

RateLimits

RateLimits

Commercial 4

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Plans

FinOps

Plans

FinOps

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

About

About

Other 3

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

PublicAPIsListing

PublicAPIsListing

DataDownload

DataDownload

Source (apis.yml)

aid: fooddata-central
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/fooddata-central.png
name: FoodData Central
description: National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference
url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-05-28'
modified: '2026-05-28'
x-source: public-apis/public-apis
x-category: Health
x-tier: 3
x-tier-reason: bulk-registered-from-public-apis
tags:
- Health
- Public APIs
apis:
- name: FoodData Central
  description: National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference
  humanURL: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
  baseURL: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
  tags:
  - Health
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
- aid: fooddata-central-central:fooddata-fdc-api
  name: FoodData Central FDC API
  description: endpoints to retrieve nutrient data
  humanURL: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide
  baseURL: https://api.nal.usda.gov/fdc/v1
  tags:
  - FDC
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/fooddata-central-fdc-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide
  - type: Signup
    url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-key-signup
common:
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/fooddata-central-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
- type: PublicAPIsListing
  url: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/fooddata-central-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/fooddata-central-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/fooddata-central-authentication.yml
- type: Documentation
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide
- type: Portal
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
- type: Signup
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-key-signup
- type: About
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/about-us
- type: Contact
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/contact
- type: FAQ
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/faq
- type: DataDownload
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/download-datasets
- type: ChangeLog
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/log
- type: X
  url: https://twitter.com/usda_ars
- type: Plans
  url: plans/fooddata-central-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/fooddata-central-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/fooddata-central-finops.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/fooddata-central-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/fooddata-central-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/fooddata-central-authentication.yml
- type: Plans
  url: plans/fooddata-central-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/fooddata-central-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/fooddata-central-finops.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

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