PUBLIC DATA API · USDA FoodData Central

USDA Foundation Foods

Name: USDA Foundation Foods
Creator: USDA FoodData Central
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Search USDA Foundation Foods and compare nutrient measurements with their units and per-100 g basis.

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RapidAPI: 100 free requests/month, monthly plans $5.00. Apify: $0.002 per completed operation.

Plans on RapidAPI and Apify

Who it's for

Developers building food-search and nutrition-reference tools.
Analysts comparing food measurements on the same unit and basis.
Researchers tracing nutrient values back to USDA source records.

What's inside

Records: Loading records…
Coverage: Foundation Foods from the April 2026 USDA release.
Check cadence: Planned: weekly

Food identities, nutrient definitions and source-reported nutrient measurements.
Protein search and food detail with units, exact source amounts and provenance.

Fields

Selected API fields. Examples preserve saved source values.

Name	Type	Example	Meaning
`fdc_id`	string	`2644282`	USDA FoodData Central ID.
`description`	string	`Chickpeas, (garbanzo beans, bengal gram), dry`	USDA food description.
`publication_date`	date \| null	`2023-10-26`	Food publication date, not the import date.
`protein_g_per_100g`	decimal string \| null	`21.275000000000`	Protein, nutrient 1003, grams per 100 g. Null means no accepted measurement; zero is measured zero.

Sample record

8 Foundation Foods from the retained April 2026 CSV archive. Saved source values shown with API field names.

2644282

Chickpeas, (garbanzo beans, bengal gram), dry

View record JSON

{
  "fdc_id": "2644282",
  "description": "Chickpeas, (garbanzo beans, bengal gram), dry",
  "publication_date": "2023-10-26",
  "protein_g_per_100g": "21.275000000000"
}

Explore historical sample records →

Endpoints

Metadata, search and individual record lookup. Follow the RapidAPI or Apify listing for its host, authentication and response schema.

GET /v1/datasets/usda-foundation
GET /v1/foods?q=lentils&limit=20
GET /v1/foods/{fdc_id}

Compare Foundation Foods protein per 100 g →

Plans on RapidAPI and Apify

Prices in USD for USDA Foundation Foods. Each dataset is purchased separately. How the pricing models work →

Via RapidAPI

Free

$0.00

100 requests a month. Requests stop at 100.

Monthly

$5.00 / month

5,000 requests a month for $5.00. Then $0.002 per extra request. Unused requests don't roll over.

Via Apify

$0.002 per completed operation

Pay-per-event on Apify. One event is a completed metadata, search or detail operation after successful output, including an empty search. Billing is per operation, regardless of how many rows it returns.

1,000 completed operations cost $2.00 in Apify event charges. Review the Actor's Pricing tab →

Subscribe on RapidAPI ↗Run on Apify ↗

Import log

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Source & attribution

USDA Foundation Foods, April 2026 CSV archive ↗

Publisher: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center

Public domain, CC0 1.0 Universal ↗

USDA identifies FoodData Central data as public domain under CC0 1.0. Permission is not required. USDA requests credit to FoodData Central and, when possible, notification of products using its data. The API guide supplies the suggested citation below; identify the release actually used as well.

Publisher terms and reuse guidance ↗

Public domain / CC0 1.0. Waztap is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by USDA. Waztap structures Foundation Foods from the April 2026 release, preserving source values and units.

Source terms checked: 2026-10-21. This is not a data freshness claim.

Data Sources & Attribution

Data quality

Status: Pass
Source release: 2026-04-30
Checked at (UTC): 2026-10-21T10:18:21.766Z
Row counts: Match
Integrity: pass
Spot-check fields: 575/575 passed

Table	Waztap rows	Source rows in scope
food	395	395
nutrient	234	234
food_nutrient	16,975	16,975

Integrity failures: duplicate primary IDs 0; orphan foreign keys 0; required fields missing 0.

Spot-check: 75 records, compared using live-api-and-bulk. See the report for the fixed seed, per-field results and comparison scope.

Freshness

pass. Last import (UTC): 2026-10-11T22:53:49.940Z. Last check for a source release (UTC): 2026-10-21T10:02:33.726Z. Next scheduled check (UTC): 2026-10-26T04:30:00.000Z.

Intentional differences

Serve only food.csv records listed in foundation_food.csv. Source table counts use this same declared membership, not all food.csv records.
Serve only nutrient definitions referenced by included Foundation measurements.
The three-table product excludes ancillary source tables, including market_acquisition; complete source ZIP is retained privately.
Exclude the existing reviewed 33 blank measurements referencing undefined nutrient 2066. Only exact measurement/food IDs in the Foundation exclusion policy qualify, with every non-identity source field blank; all other orphan references fail.
foundation_food.NDB_number is exposed as food.ndb_number; source strings, empty optional values and SQL numeric/date representations are normalized only as declared per field.
source_fields/source_sha256 preserve provenance; source_unit, basis and quality_issues are derived metadata rather than source CSV columns. Source columns remain field-compared.
Live FoodData Central API food identities/presentations map fdcId to fdc_id, dataType Foundation to foundation_food, foodCategory.id to food_category_id, ndbNumber to ndb_number, and API publicationDate MM/DD/YYYY to ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Fields absent from the API are checked against the live official bulk archive.

Download qa-report.json for source checksums, thresholds and mismatch details.

Checked against the source as described in the QA report; provided as-is.

Report an issue

Limitations

Foundation Foods only. Branded products and barcode lookup are excluded.
Missing measurements stay null. Compare values using the same unit and basis.
Measurements are source-reported, not dietary advice or a complete nutrient profile.