--- title: "Free Food APIs for Developers: The Complete List (2026) — Tiny Plates" description: "A free food API for every job: recipes, nutrition, barcodes, photos, drinks and restaurants. Free limits, keys and licenses checked in October 2026." url: "https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/free-food-apis" --- # Free food APIs for developers: the complete list Recipes, nutrition, barcodes, photos, drinks and restaurants. What's free, what needs a key, and what you can do with the data. 18 October 2026 Need food data for a side project, a class or a hackathon? There's more of it out there than you'd think. The hard part is finding out what's actually free, what needs a key, and what you're allowed to do with the data once you have it. So we made the list we wanted. Every API below was alive when we checked in October 2026\. For each one you get what's in it, the free limits, the license or terms, and one request you can paste into a terminal. We left out anything we couldn't confirm still works. One heads-up before you start. "Free" means very different things here. Some are public domain and you can do anything with them. Some are free only while you're testing. Some ask for a link back. We've tried to say which is which. Here's the short version. The details are below. | API | What it's for | Key needed | Free limit | Commercial use on free | | ----------------------- | ------------------------ | --------------- | -------------------- | ---------------------------- | | Tiny Plates | Recipes | Yes | 50 a day, 300 a week | Yes | | TheMealDB | Recipes | Test key 1 | No stated quota | $10 one-off to go public | | Spoonacular | Recipes, products, menus | Yes | 50 points a day | Yes, with a backlink | | USDA FoodData Central | Nutrition | Yes (data.gov) | 1,000 an hour | Yes, public domain | | FatSecret Basic | Nutrition | Yes (OAuth) | 5,000 a day, US only | Yes, with attribution | | CalorieNinjas | Nutrition from text | Yes | 10,000 a month | No | | Open Food Facts | Packaged food, barcodes | No (User-Agent) | Per-minute limits | Yes, ODbL | | Unsplash | Photos | Yes | 50 an hour (demo) | Yes, with credit | | Pexels | Photos | Yes | 200 an hour | Yes, with credit | | TheCocktailDB | Drinks | Test key 1 | No stated quota | $10 one-off to go public | | Open Brewery DB | Breweries | No | None | Yes, MIT | | OpenStreetMap Overpass | Restaurants and places | No | Fair use | Yes, ODbL | | UK Food Hygiene Ratings | Restaurant hygiene | No | Not stated | Yes, Open Government Licence | ## Recipes **Tiny Plates.** Yes, that's us, so take this one with a pinch of salt. Tiny Plates has thousands of recipes in English, Spanish and Swedish, gathered from public recipe pages. Every recipe comes back the same shape: ingredients split into quantity, unit and name, numbered steps, times, allergens and nutrition when the source published it. On top of that you get search by meaning, cooking from what's in the fridge, shopping lists, scaling and substitutions. The free plan is 50 requests a day and 300 a week per account. No credit card. If you need more, ask and we'll raise it. We don't make an uptime promise yet. You can cache the recipes your users open, but you can't copy the whole index. Credit the source and link to the original recipe. ```bash curl 'https://api.tinyplates.dev/search?query=quick%20vegetarian%20dinner&limit=5' \ -H 'Authorization: Bearer rd_your_api_key' ``` There's also an [MCP server](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/tiny-plates-mcp-server) if you're building with an AI agent. **TheMealDB.** The classic first recipe API. It's community built, simple, and you don't even need to sign up. The test key is just `1`. It had 793 meals when we checked. Ingredients and measures are plain text, so you'll be parsing "1/2 cup" yourself. The test key is for development and education. To release an app publicly you become a supporter with a one-off $10 payment, which also unlocks extras like filtering on several ingredients. It's also one of the few with a random endpoint, which is great for "surprise me" buttons. ```bash curl 'https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/random.php' ``` **Spoonacular.** The widest food API you can sign up for. Recipes, grocery products, restaurant menu items, meal plans and more under one key. The free plan gives you 50 points a day at 1 request per second, and it needs a backlink to Spoonacular. Points aren't requests: a recipe search costs 1 point plus a bit per result. Paid plans start at $29 a month. Watch the terms on caching. Most data can only be kept for an hour, with permission. ```bash curl 'https://api.spoonacular.com/recipes/complexSearch?query=pasta&apiKey=YOUR_KEY' ``` If you're weighing these up, we wrote side-by-side pages for [Spoonacular](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/spoonacular) and [TheMealDB](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/themealdb). There's also a longer look at [the best recipe APIs](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/best-recipe-apis) and at [Spoonacular alternatives](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/spoonacular-alternatives). And if you used Yummly back in the day, it's gone. Here's [what to use instead](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/yummly-alternatives). ## Nutrition **USDA FoodData Central.** This is the big one, and it's properly free. The data is public domain under CC0\. You don't need permission, though USDA asks you to name FoodData Central as your source. It covers lab-analysed basic foods (Foundation and SR Legacy), foods as people actually eat them (FNDDS), and a huge set of branded products from their labels. You need a free data.gov key. The default limit is 1,000 requests an hour per IP. There's a `DEMO_KEY` for trying things out, but it's capped at 30 requests an hour and 50 a day. Don't commit your real key to a public repo. USDA says it deactivates keys it finds online. ```bash curl 'https://api.nal.usda.gov/fdc/v1/foods/search?api_key=DEMO_KEY&query=cheddar%20cheese' ``` **FatSecret Platform API.** A big food and nutrition database with a free Basic tier: 5,000 calls a day, US foods only, English only, and you must credit FatSecret. Startups under $1 million in revenue and funding, non-profits and students can apply for Premier Free, which lifts the call limit. Auth is OAuth 2.0, so there's a little more setup than a plain key. **CalorieNinjas.** Send it a sentence like "3 eggs and a slice of toast" and it gives you back the nutrition. That's handy for a quick food logger. The free tier is 10,000 calls a month, but it's not for commercial use. Paid plans start at $8 a month. ```bash curl 'https://api.calorieninjas.com/v1/nutrition?query=3%20eggs%20and%20a%20slice%20of%20toast' \ -H 'X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY' ``` Nutrition is a deep topic, and the numbers don't all come from the same place. A calorie count for a recipe is always an estimate. It depends on raw or cooked weights, how big a serving is, and how much "salt to taste" really means. Pick the source that matches what you're counting: single foods, packaged products or whole recipes. ## Packaged food and barcodes **Open Food Facts.** A crowdsourced database of packaged food from all over the world. Think of it as Wikipedia for food labels: ingredients, allergens, nutrition, Nutri-Score and photos, looked up by barcode. The database is under the Open Database License (ODbL), and photos are CC BY-SA. If you use it, you share alike and give credit. Reading doesn't need a key, but you must send a User-Agent like `MyApp/1.0 (you@example.com)`. The docs list rate limits per IP: 15 product reads a minute and 10 searches a minute when we checked. Their rule of thumb is one API call per real scan by a user. If you want the whole thing, download their exports instead of scraping. There's also a staging server for testing. ```bash curl 'https://world.openfoodfacts.org/api/v2/product/737628064502.json' \ -H 'User-Agent: MyApp/1.0 (you@example.com)' ``` USDA's branded foods (above) are another good source for US products, and FatSecret has barcode lookups too. ## Food photos There's no great free API that only does food pictures. The general photo libraries work well, though. Just search for the dish. **Unsplash.** Free, with a Client-ID key. New apps start in demo mode at 50 requests an hour. Once Unsplash approves your app it's 1,000 an hour. Two rules: credit the photographer and Unsplash, and use their image URLs directly instead of downloading and re-hosting. ```bash curl 'https://api.unsplash.com/search/photos?query=ramen&per_page=10' \ -H 'Authorization: Client-ID YOUR_ACCESS_KEY' ``` **Pexels.** Also free. The default is 200 requests an hour and 20,000 a month, and you can ask for more. Show a clear link to Pexels and credit the photographer when you can. ```bash curl 'https://api.pexels.com/v1/search?query=pancakes&per_page=5' \ -H 'Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY' ``` Recipe APIs usually include photos as well. Those belong to the recipe's source, so link back and don't treat them as stock images. ## Drinks **TheCocktailDB.** The sister site of TheMealDB, with the same setup. Test key `1` for development, $10 one-off to go public. Search, lookup, filter by ingredient, and a random cocktail. ```bash curl 'https://www.thecocktaildb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=margarita' ``` **Open Brewery DB.** Breweries, brewpubs and cideries with addresses and coordinates. No sign-up, no key and no rate limits. The project is MIT licensed and community run. One thing to know: the last dataset release was in 2024, so some entries may be out of date. ```bash curl 'https://api.openbrewerydb.org/v1/breweries?by_city=portland&per_page=5' ``` ## Restaurants and menus This is where free gets thin. Most restaurant data costs money. But there are a few good options. **OpenStreetMap via Overpass.** Every restaurant, café and food truck someone has mapped, with opening hours, cuisine tags and sometimes a website. The map data is under the ODbL. The public Overpass server is free but shared, and it's often busy. Stay well under its fair-use guidance, send a User-Agent, and back off for 30 seconds if you get a 429\. For anything regular, run your own instance or cache hard. ```bash curl -G 'https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter' \ --data-urlencode 'data=[out:json];node["amenity"="restaurant"](around:1000,59.3293,18.0686);out;' ``` **UK Food Hygiene Ratings.** The UK Food Standards Agency publishes hygiene ratings for restaurants, takeaways and shops in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. It's free, needs no key, and the data is under the Open Government Licence. You do have to send an `x-api-version: 2` header or you get nothing back. ```bash curl 'https://api.ratings.food.gov.uk/Establishments?name=pizza&address=london' \ -H 'x-api-version: 2' ``` **Foursquare Places.** Search and details for millions of places, restaurants included. It's paid by usage, but it comes with a monthly free allowance. The exact amount has changed over time, so check their pricing page. **Spoonacular** (from the recipe section) also has 115K+ menu items from US restaurant chains, on the same free points. ## Worth knowing, but not free A few names come up in every list like this, so here's where they stand. **Edamam** has great recipe, food and nutrition APIs, but none of them has a free plan. Some plans come with a short free trial, 10 or 30 days depending on the API. Attribution is required on all of them. Our [Edamam comparison](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/edamam) has the details. **Nutritionix** used to have a free tier. Its developer site now says it can no longer keep one going. You can ask for a limited trial. **Yelp Fusion** moved to paid plans in 2024\. You get a trial key, then you pay. Check their developer site for current prices. **Yummly** closed its API in 2019 and the whole service in 2024. **Foodish**, the random food picture API, wasn't responding when we checked, so we left it out. ## Things to build with two of them The fun starts when you mix sources. A few ideas: * **A barcode-to-dinner app.** Scan a jar with Open Food Facts, then ask Tiny Plates' `/pantry` endpoint what you can cook with it. * **A recipe calorie checker.** Take the ingredients of a TheMealDB recipe and look each one up in USDA FoodData Central. You'll learn a lot about why recipe calories are hard. * **Dinner and a drink.** Pick a meal from TheMealDB and a random cocktail from TheCocktailDB. Perfect for a hackathon demo. * **Eat out or stay in.** Show nearby restaurants from OpenStreetMap next to a few Tiny Plates recipes. Check each recipe's `times` in your code and keep the ones under 30 minutes. * **A safer takeaway map.** Plot UK hygiene ratings on top of OpenStreetMap restaurants. * **A fridge roulette.** Type what you have and get a recipe. We built one, and you can play with it right here: ## Fridge Roulette Live, on the real API. Go on, give it a spin. Bookmark this page, but double-check the pricing pages before you build. Free tiers change a lot. And if a recipe API is what you need, [grab a free Tiny Plates key](https://www.tinyplates.dev/sign-up). It takes a minute.