I've been working on a small side project and ended up building a nutrition API to solve a problem I kept running into: every food-related app needs the same data (calories, macros, ingredients), but there's no easy way to get it without either paying hundreds a month or scraping nutrition labels off the web.
So I packaged Open Food Facts — a free, open database with 3M+ products — into a clean REST API and put it on RapidAPI.
What it does
Two main endpoints:
Search by name
GET /food/search?q=nutella
Returns the top matching products with brand, image, and Nutri-Score grade.
Look up by barcode
GET /food/barcode/3017620422003
Returns the full nutrition panel: calories, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, salt, fiber, plus ingredients and Nutri-Score.
Example response
{
"id": "3017620422003",
"name": "Nutella",
"brand": "Ferrero",
"nutrition_grade": "e",
"nutriments": {
"energy_kcal": 539,
"fat": 30.9,
"sugars": 56.3,
"proteins": 6.3
}
}
What it's useful for
- Calorie counters and macro trackers
- Meal planners and recipe apps
- Barcode scanner apps
- Diet dashboards
- Fitness companion apps
What I learned building it
A few things I didn't expect:
- The upstream search API (Open Food Facts) is flaky — goes down regularly. Barcode lookup is much more stable.
- Caching everything for 24 hours cuts external dependency by ~90% and makes responses instant.
- RapidAPI's pricing model is more flexible than I thought — you can set up freemium tiers in about 10 minutes.
Try it
There's a free tier if anyone wants to test it out. Would love honest feedback — what's missing, what would make it more useful, what would make you actually use it in a project.
my project : https://rapidapi.com/kanenas-FTyg1YyYI/api/food-nutrition-api3
Still iterating on it. If you're building something in this space, feel free to reach out.
