Hey Hunter, Busybody here, maker of Calorie API. We built this because we were shipping a meal tracker and kept hitting the same wall: there is no good production food database sitting behind a boring REST API. USDA FoodData Central is excellent for research, but the demo key and rate limits are not something you put in front of real users. Open Food Facts helps for barcodes, then the payload shape is different. Paid nutrition APIs work until pricing or ToS get in the way. So we kept a catalog in-house: search, autocomplete, UPC/EAN lookup, macros per 100g and eventually opened it as Calorie API so other apps do not have to maintain that catalog either. The problem we were solving is not “another calorie app.” It is the data layer those apps sit on. You send X-API-Key, you get JSON. Your app stores the diary; we do not. The product changed while we used it ourselves. First it was internal search. Then barcode fallback, verified foods, a public playground so you can try it without signing up, docs, and an OpenAPI spec. Same endpoints you would actually wire into a logger: suggest while they type, food details on select, barcode when they scan. Try it (no key): calorieapi.com/playground Docs: calorieapi.com/docs Free key: calorieapi.com If you have shipped a meal tracker: what broke first, search ranking, barcodes, or licensing?

Calorie API

Food Database and Calorie API for production health apps

Food Database and Calorie API for production health apps