Data Sources & Attribution
Why This Page Exists
Foodashi draws on two kinds of external data: open culinary datasets that help us check that the dishes we generate are real, and national food composition databases that our nutrition figures are calculated from. This page lists each source, the licence it is published under, how we use it, and the credit it requires.
We do not reproduce article text or prose from these sources. We use structured data (dish names, cuisine identifiers, ingredient relationships, and per-100 g nutrient values) and link back to each source.
Building an app on Foodashi? If your app displays our nutrition, ingredient, or barcode data, add a link to this page, or copy the attribution statements below, somewhere your users can find it, such as an About or Credits screen. This credit does not need to mention Foodashi. Separately, the Hobby plan requires a visible "Powered by Foodashi" credit; paid plans need no Foodashi branding. See Section 6 of the API License Agreement.
Questions or corrections? If you believe a data source is misrepresented on this page, or you'd like us to add attribution that isn't here, email us at [email protected].
Attribution Statements
These statements credit the sources of the nutrition and product data served by the Foodashi API:
- Contains information from Open Food Facts, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL).
- Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence (Canada).
- Nutrient data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central.
- Nutrient data from ANSES, Ciqual French food composition table.
- Nutrient data from the Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Nutrient data from the Australian Food Composition Database.
- Nutrient data from Fuerniss HF, Gifford CL, Mortensen EG, Belk KE, Engle TE, Woerner DR. Nutrient Analysis of Raw United States Beef Offal Items. Nutrients 2024;16(18):3104, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Wikidata
Wikidata is Wikipedia's structured-data sister project. We ingest its food subgraph: dish entities (Q-IDs), their cuisine classifications, country-of-origin links, and main-ingredient relationships.
Approximately 50,000 dish entities with their cuisine (P2012), country of origin (P495), main food ingredient (P186), and English/native-language labels. Also cuisine-to-region mappings.
The data drives our ontology-consistency check: if Wikidata records that Pad Thai's main ingredient is rice noodles, and a candidate recipe titled "Pad Thai" generates wheat pasta, we flag the mismatch. Wikidata is also a primary source for our canonical-dish discovery pipeline.
We normalize labels to lowercase for case-insensitive matching. We filter to food-related entities only (instance of dish Q746549 or subclasses). No content is modified; it is only selected and indexed.
Wikidata is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which waives all copyright. Attribution is not legally required; we credit Wikidata anyway out of respect for the open-knowledge ecosystem. Source: wikidata.org.
Wikipedia
We query Wikipedia's REST API to confirm whether a dish has a dedicated article, a strong signal that the dish is real and documented. We do not copy article text.
Article titles, article URLs, Wikidata Q-ID sitelinks, and category-tree membership (for example, "Category:Italian cuisine" as a seed list of dish candidates). All are factual identifiers.
Dish existence grounding: if a candidate dish has a corresponding Wikipedia article, we treat that as strong evidence the dish is real. Article absence is a weaker signal because Wikipedia coverage of regional cuisines is uneven. Category trees also seed our initial dish discovery for each cuisine.
We do not reproduce any article text. We cache article-existence lookups for performance, store canonical URLs as references, and combine Wikipedia evidence with other sources to produce our own evaluations. All derivative analysis is our own.
Wikipedia article text is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. We reference articles rather than reproduce their text, and we credit Wikipedia here and link to every article we reference. Source: wikipedia.org.
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
UNESCO maintains inventories of culinary traditions inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, such as the Mediterranean diet, Gastronomic meal of the French, Washoku (Japanese traditional dietary cultures), and others.
Only the names of inscribed culinary traditions, which are facts, used as hints to surface long-tail traditional foods that may be underrepresented in other sources. We do not reproduce UNESCO descriptions, images, or other content.
Seed source for canonical-dish discovery in cuisines where Wikipedia/Wikidata coverage is sparse. Cross-referenced against our other sources; UNESCO-listed foods receive a higher confidence tier in our validation pipeline.
UNESCO content is subject to the UNESCO Terms of Use. We acknowledge UNESCO as the source of these references. Source: ich.unesco.org.
Slow Food Ark of Taste
The Slow Food Ark of Taste catalogues endangered traditional foods and regional culinary specialties at risk of extinction. It's an invaluable source for long-tail regional cuisine documentation.
Product names, country/region attributions, and category classifications. We use the catalogue as a factual reference to identify authentic regional specialties; we do not reproduce the descriptive text from product pages.
High-confidence source for dishes in under-documented regional cuisines. If a dish appears in both the Ark of Taste and Wikidata, it passes our canonical-source threshold automatically.
Ark of Taste content is © Slow Food. We reference products by name and link back to their Slow Food product pages. We do not reproduce descriptive content. Source: fondazioneslowfood.com.
Nutrition & Food Composition Databases
Nutrition figures are calculated from per-ingredient values. Each ingredient in a recipe is matched to an entry in our
ingredient database, and most entries carry measured per-100 g values from the databases below. Some values are
derived by rule (for example, sugars are zero when carbohydrate is zero), and where no database covers an ingredient,
the value is estimated by AI and carries a lower confidence score. Each recipe's aggregate confidence is served as
nutrition_meta.confidence by GET /api/recipes/{id}/nutrition.
USDA FoodData Central
The United States Department of Agriculture's food composition database, and the backbone of our nutritional data. We use its SR Legacy, Foundation Foods, and Branded Foods datasets.
Per-100 g values for energy, protein, fat, carbohydrate, sodium, fibre, saturated fat and sugars, plus food group classifications and standard portion weights.
FoodData Central data are in the public domain and published under CC0 1.0 Universal. No permission is needed; USDA asks users to list FoodData Central as the source, and we do. Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central, fdc.nal.usda.gov.
ANSES Ciqual (France)
The French food composition table, published by the Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l'alimentation (ANSES). Our main source for European preparations that USDA does not cover.
ANSES makes the Ciqual table available as open data and authorises reuse under the Open Licence referenced on its website. We credit the source as: ANSES, Ciqual French food composition table. Source: anses.fr and ciqual.anses.fr.
ADEME AGRIBALYSE (France)
The French environmental database of food products, published by ADEME (the French Agency for Ecological
Transition). We use its climate change results (kg CO2 equivalent per kg of food, from farm to consumer) to
estimate the climate footprint of a recipe from its ingredient weights, served by
/api/recipes/{id}/sustainability. The estimate is ours; ADEME does not review or endorse it.
ADEME publishes the AGRIBALYSE results under the Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab), which permits reuse, including commercial reuse, with credit. We credit the source as: Source ADEME, données AGRIBALYSE v3.2, updated 29 January 2026. Source: data.gouv.fr and agribalyse.ademe.fr.
MEXT Japan
The Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan, published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Our source for Japanese ingredients that Western tables omit, such as kombu, katsuobushi, mirin and the soy ferments.
The MEXT website terms of use allow content published on the site to be used freely, including for commercial purposes, and state that numerical data and simple tables are not subject to copyright. We credit MEXT as the source. Source: MEXT website terms of use and mext.go.jp.
McCance & Widdowson's, CoFID (United Kingdom)
The Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID), the dataset accompanying McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods. We use the published dataset, not the book's text or tables.
CoFID is published on GOV.UK under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse with attribution. Attribution statement: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The book itself remains copyright of the Royal Society of Chemistry and we do not reproduce it. Source: gov.uk CoFID.
Canadian Nutrient File (Health Canada)
Health Canada's reference food composition database, used for North American items and preparations that differ from their U.S. equivalents.
Published by Health Canada under the Open Government Licence (Canada), which permits commercial reuse with attribution. Attribution statement: Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence (Canada). This does not imply that Health Canada endorses Foodashi or its use of the data. Source: food-nutrition.canada.ca.
Australian Food Composition Database (FSANZ)
Food Standards Australia New Zealand's reference food composition database, used for foods its analyses cover and the U.S. tables do not, such as raw mutton.
Material on the FSANZ website is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which permits commercial reuse with attribution. Attribution: Food Standards Australia New Zealand. This does not imply that FSANZ endorses Foodashi or its use of the data. Source: foodstandards.gov.au.
Nutrient Analysis of Raw U.S. Beef Offal Items (Nutrients, 2024)
A peer-reviewed laboratory analysis of retail U.S. beef offal by Fuerniss, Gifford, Mortensen, Belk, Engle and Woerner, used for beef bone marrow, which the government tables do not carry.
Published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Source: doi.org/10.3390/nu16183104.
Open Food Facts
A global, community-built database of packaged food products. We use it for branded and regional packaged items that no government table lists, and for the barcode lookup endpoint.
Product names, barcodes, per-100 g nutritional values, ingredient lists and allergen declarations. Product images, where shown, are the work of Open Food Facts contributors.
The Open Food Facts database is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; individual contents are under the Database Contents License, and contributor photographs are under CC BY-SA. ODbL permits commercial use and requires attribution. Anyone displaying information that comes from Open Food Facts must show this notice: "Contains information from Open Food Facts, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL)." Values in our catalogue that come from Open Food Facts remain available under the ODbL: on request, we will provide them, with a description of any changes we made, in machine-readable form. If you believe our usage is inconsistent with the ODbL, email [email protected] and we will respond within 5 business days. Source: openfoodfacts.org.
Our Commitments
- Every new external data source we integrate will be added to this page before launch.
- We only use sources whose licences permit our use; where we find one that does not, we replace it and say so here.
- If a source's license terms change, we will review our usage within 30 days and update this page.
- If you are a data-source operator and believe our usage is inconsistent with your license, contact us at [email protected] and we will respond within 5 business days.
- Our own generated recipe data (ingredients, quantities, instructions, nutritional analysis) is proprietary to Foodashi and is covered by our API License Agreement, except for third-party values that remain under an open licence as described above.
Provider Details (Impresszum)
Business registration in progress. Foodashi is operated from Budapest,
Hungary and is in the process of being registered as an egyéni vállalkozó
(Hungarian sole proprietorship). Full statutory provider details — registered name,
seat address, registration number and tax number — will be published here as soon
as registration completes, and before any paid service is offered.
Until then you can reach us at
[email protected]
for any legal, contractual or data protection matter.
