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Top 7 Food & Restaurant APIs We Love (And You Should Too!) [Updated for 2019]
A restaurant Application Program Interface (API) allows you to access and integrate with restaurant-related databases so you can add relevant restaurant and dining information to your own application. These restaurants APIs make it easy to search for restaurants and display information users want to know, such as:
- cuisine type
- menus
- location
- ratings
What is the best food & restaurant API?
After reviewing over 30 food & restaurant APIs, we found these 7 APIs to be the very best and worth mentioning:
Our Top 7 Best Food, Restaurant, & Recipe APIs for 2019
| Spoonacular | Best for Recipes & Food Products | Connect to API |
| Zomato | Best for Restaurants & Menus | Connect to API |
| Nutritionix - Nutrition Database | Best for Food Search & UPC Scan | Connect to API |
| Edamam Nutrition Analysis | Best for Ingredient & Nutrition | Connect to API |
| E-additives | Best for Food Additives | Connect to API |
| Chomp | Best for Food Products | Connect to API |
| WebKnox | Best for Recipes | Connect to API |
Our Top Picks for Best Food & Restaurant APIs
1. Spoonacular
Spoonacular's Recipe – Food – Nutrition API gives you access to more than 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products.
This API offers an extensive list of features, including:
- A semantic search engine that allows you to use natural language queries
- Automatic nutritional information calculator for any recipe
- Recipe cost analysis
- Recipes based on special diets, including vegan, gluten-free, Paleo, high protein, etc.
- and more.
Popular endpoints include:
- Autocomplete Recipe Search – which autocompletes partial input and returns possible recipe names
- Classify Cuisine – which provides a cuisine type classification for a specific entry.
Spoonacular API Pricing
The Spoonacular API offers plans ranging from a free basic plan to a high-volume mega plan.
Example prices include:
- Free up to 50 requests, 500 tiny requests, and 500 results per day, plus $0.003 – $0.007 per extra call
- $29 up to 500 requests, 5,000 tiny requests, and 5,000 results per day, plus $0.001 – $0.004 per extra call
- $999 up to 30,000 requests, 200,000 tiny requests, and 100,000 results per day, plus $0.001 per extra call
2. Zomato
Zomato provides information for more than 1.5 million restaurants, located in 10,000 cities around the globe.
The Zomato API gives you the ability to search restaurants by
- name
- location
- cuisine type
- display rating information
- show a city’s best dining areas using the Zomato Foodie Index.
Popular endpoints include:
- getCollection - which returns Zomato Restaurant Collections by city
- getDailyMenu - which returns a restaurant’s menu information.
Learn how to use the Zomato API and get an API Key.
Zomato API Pricing
The Zomato API offers a free tier up to 1,000 calls per day. For additional calls, reach out to the Zomato team for more information about price structure and requirements.
3. Nutritionix - Nutrition Database
Nutritionix Nutrition Database API provides nutrition data for more than 100,000 restaurant foods, 230,000 food manufacturer UPCs, and 10,000 USDA common foods.
Popular endpoints include:
- Food Search - which returns nutrient data for all foods included in a request
- UPC Scan - which returns nutrition data based on a UPC label scan.
Nutritionix API Pricing
Nutritionix's Nutrition Database API is completely free to use on RapidAPI.
Get a free API key today!4. Edamam Nutrition Analysis
The Edamam Nutrition Analysis API (food database API) provides a comprehensive food database and nutrition analysis.
The Edamam API offers an extensive list of features, including:- A semantic search engine that allows you to use natural language queries
- Nutrition information for an entire recipe or broken down for each ingredient
- Nutrient data based on diet, allergy and health labeling
- Recipes prioritized based on cookability and quality
- and more
The API has a single endpoint Food Text Analysis, which extracts information from short, unstructured food texts and returns:
- Quantity
- Measure
- Diet
- Allergens
- and more.
Edamam API Pricing
Edamam's Nutrition Analysis API is completely free to use on RapidAPI. Get a free API key today to enrich your app!
5. E-additives
The E-additives API is a simple REST API that provides information about food additives.
The API has 5 endpoints:
- /additives - Get a list of food additives.
- /additives/search - Search food additives.
- /additives/{code} - Get information about a single additive.
- /categories - Get a list of all categories.
- /categories/{id} - Get information about a specific category.
The E-additives API is a completely free API to use on RapidAPI.
6. Chomp
Chomp's Food Nutrition Database API provides high quality data on over 535,000 food products.
Search products and get detailed information about:
- Allergens MineralsPalm OilsDietsVitaminsTrace IngredientsBrandsand much more.
How much does the Chomp API cost?
The Chomp API has 3 pricing tiers:
- Basic - $19/month for 500 products.
- Pro - $49/month for 20,000 food products
- Ultra - $99/month for 50,000 food products
7. WebKnox
The WebKnox Recipe API allows you to search more than 330,000 recipes using natural language and provides extensive information on:
- ingredients
- nutrition
- prices
- tips
- and more.
Popular endpoints include:
- Compute Daily Meal Plan - which returns a day’s meal plan
- Find By Ingredients - which allows you to find popular recipes using as many of the given ingredients as possible.
WebKnox API Pricing
The WebKnox Recipe API offers plans ranging from a free basic plan to a high-volume mega plan.
Example prices include:
- Free up to 10 requests and 1,000 widgets per day, plus $0.005 per extra request and $0.001 per extra widget
- $25 up to 250 requests and 10,000 widgets per day, plus $0.003 per extra request and $0.0005 per extra widget
- $1,000 up to 20,000 requests and 1,000 widgets per day, plus $0.003 per extra request and $0.01 per extra widget
Conclusion
These are some of our favorite free food & restaurant APIs. Did we miss your favorite food or recipe data API? Let us know in the comments below!
All food, recipe, and nutrition APIs mentioned above and accessible on RapidAPI.com are available in the following programming languages:
- Node.js
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
- Objective-C
- Java (for Android)
- C# (.net)
- cURL
- RapidQL
To learn more how to get started with these RapidAPI SDKs, visit our docs.
Summary: Best Food & Restaurant APIs for Developers
| API | Recipes | Ingredients | Nutrition Info | Restaurant Info | Free Plan Available |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spoonacular | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, 500 requests/day |
| Zomato | No | No | No | No | Yes, 1,000 requests/day |
| Nutritionix | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, unlimited |
| Edamam | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, unlimited |
| E-additives | No | Yes | No | No | Yes, unlimited |
| Chomp | No | Yes | Yes | No | No, Plans start at $19/month |
| WebKnox | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, 10 requests/day |
Complete List of the Best Food & Restaurant APIs
- Recipe - Food - Nutrition - The spoonacular Nutrition, Recipe, and Food API allows you to access over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products. Our food ontology and semantic recipe search engine makes it possible to search for recipes using natural language queries, such as "gluten free brownies without sugar" or "low fat vegan cupcakes." You can automatically calculate the nutritional information for any recipe, analyze recipe costs, visualize ingredient lists, find recipes for what's in your fridge, find recipes based on special diets, nutritional requirements, or favorite ingredients, classify recipes into types and cuisines, convert ingredient amounts, or even compute an entire meal plan. With our powerful API, you can create many kinds of food and especially nutrition apps. Special diets/dietary requirements currently available include: vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, gluten free, grain free, dairy free, high protein, low sodium, low carb, Paleo, Primal, ketogenic, FODMAP, and Whole 30. We will soon be adding Weight Watcher points, too.
- TheCocktailDB - API to get data on alcohol & cocktails.
- Zomato - Get access to the freshest and most exhaustive information for over 1.5 million restaurants across 10,000 cities globally.
- Edamam Nutrition Analysis - The Nutrition Analysis API and Database uses Natural Language Processing and semantically structured data. This is the most advanced nutrition analysis technology available! Recipe nutrition analysis.
- Nutritionix - Nutrition Database - Global API of nutrition data for restaurants, food manufacturers, and USDA common foods. Includes over 230K UPCs/barcodes, 100K restaurant foods, and 10,000 common foods from the USDA.
- Recipe Search and Diet - Since we understand the recipe – ingredients, diets, allergies, nutrition, taste, techniques & more. We can connect your users with the best recipes available for their unique food preferences. Search over 2 million recipes.Search our large recipe database. We add new sites and recipes continuously. You will also get access to over 5000 top web recipe sources. Our search algorithm returns the most relevant recipes from the most popular and best recipes sources on the web. We order recipes by their cookability and quality so your customer can always count on getting the best recipes!
- US Restaurant Menus - Restaurant Menus is an API providing access to a Database of over 350,000 Restaurant Menus and over 34,000,00 Individual menu items in the US
- YelpAPI - Access local businesses data from the Yelp database.
- Recipe - The WebKnox Recipe API allows you to access over 330,000 recipes. It allows users to search for recipes using natural language such as "gluten free brownies without sugar". Furthermore, several widgets to visualize ingredient lists, price breakdowns, This Food API also contains thousands of information bits about ingredients such as nutrition, prices, tips, and more.
- Food2Fork - Food2Fork is a place to find top socially ranked recipes from tons of recipe blogs and websites.
- Rakuten Recipe - Retrieve data from Rakuten Recipe.
- E-additives - E-additives API is a REST based service that brings you information about food additives. Users can search for food additives get information about a single additive, get a list of additive categories, and get information about a single category.
- Homecook - The local food and farmers' market REST API. Search by food items, get details on a farmers' market or on a local business. This is our contribution to the local food and farmers' market developer community. From this data, we can build many applications.
- Recipe and Ingredient Analysis - Zestful provides tools to help recipe app developers better understand their recipes and ingredients.
- Nutritionix - Get nutritional data by scanning labels or searching foods.
- Product-API - Receive food product informations by providing just the barcode of the product
- Hoppit Restaurant Guide - Dubbed as "Yelp meets Pandora," the Hoppit API answers the ongoing question "Where should we eat tonight?" by giving you access to the restaurant data used by our award-winning applications, as seen on FOX, CBS, and Mashable. This includes the nation's largest repository of high-resolution restaurant photography and "Vibe" data, available for 20 U.S. cities. Filter restaurants, bars, and coffee shops by type of Vibe (e.g. Cozy, Hipster, Romantic) and scenario (e.g. with a Date, with a Colleague, with Children), as well as by price, cuisine (e.g. Italian), and meal (e.g. Brunch). Perfect for developers of travel, lifestyle, food, social, local applications who wish to surface the amazing content that Hoppit users interact with every second. Available for New York, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Denver.
- Chomp - Food Nutrition Database - Quickly and efficiently retrieve high-quality data on over 535,000 food products. We provide nutrition labels, ingredients, diet compatibility, barcodes, and more. Use a barcode or product name to retrieve detailed data. Check out our website for more information.
- Recipe ingredients tagger - A simple recipe ingredients tagger service. Can tag Comments, Quantity, Units and Name of the ingredients.
- shobr-recipes - API to retrieve recipes used with shobr.
- BigOven - Access 350,000+ recipes, reviews and nutrition facts.
- Food Nutrition Allergen and Ingredient Database - FoodFacts is the first food database providing full nutrition label, allergen information, ingredient listings, etc on the web. Since 2002 we've been making food data available to the public so they can see what's really in the foods they are eating. Now we want to help developers and start-ups get the most comprehensive data for their needs. Get data on over 250,000+ products and growing and growing each day, Custom Licensing solutions available, and Largest Fully Verified Food Database. We provide full nutrition label information, product allergen warnings, ingredient listings, images, UPC code to be used for any diet, allergen, ingredient based, and/or exercise app you are currently building.
- FitbitAPI - Access data from Fitbit activity trackers
- AI powered recipe ingredients parsing - AI powered API for parsing ingredients out of recipes.
- Restaurants Menu - Get menus of all restaurants of major Indian cities
- Campbells Kitchen - Campbell’s Kitchen is all about sharing information. In our case, that information includes thousands of recipes using brands like Campbell’s, Swanson®, Pace®, Prego® & Pepperidge Farm® – brands people love and trust, and use every day.
- Food Search Engine - Appetitoso is a semantic search engine for dishes. It allows developers to include a search engine and a recommender system into their applications by suggesting to the final users only the best dishes prepared by the restaurant near a location. Each dish has a score computed by Appetitoso taking into account more than 30 different parameter.
- Get Data Reviews - TheySay is the #1 data reviews provider. We aggregate reviews from over 100 different web sites covering industries like restaurants, hotels, tourism, health, books,.. Any need you could have for getting information from reviews from any website, we can provide it for you
- NYC Health Inspection Results - A web API for NYC food service establishment health inspection results. All information is provided by NYC Open Data. No key or authentication is required to gain access to the API. The API was implemented using a REST-like interface and is also CORS friendly. The API provides JSON and XML endpoints for accessing the restaurant information. (default is JSON)
- Recipes to grocery store - This API provides functionality to build a recipe site and meal planning system which can be connected to an online grocery store. For demonstration of a site implementing the API please visit https://madplan.nu. The API documentation is in progress, meaning more methods is being added during the next months.
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