Attribution
foodindex.co is built on public and open data. Each source below is listed with its licence, what we did to its data, and any notice its licence requires us to carry.
Open Food Facts
Open Food Facts — licensed under Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
We import the Open Food Facts bulk export, filter it to the products we cover, normalise product and ingredient text casing, and compute diet verdicts from the ingredient and nutrition fields it provides.
Contains information from Open Food Facts, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Individual contents are licensed under the Database Contents License (DbCL).
USDA FoodData Central
USDA FoodData Central — licensed under Public domain (CC0 1.0).
We read published nutrient values from FoodData Central for whole foods and present them per 100g alongside our own computed diet verdicts.
The USDA does not endorse foodindex.co or the diet verdicts we compute from its data.
FDA CFSAN safety-review datasets (SCOGS, GRAS Notices, Substances Added to Food)
FDA CFSAN safety-review datasets (SCOGS, GRAS Notices, Substances Added to Food) — licensed under US government work — public domain.
We match filed GRAS notice numbers and FDA's per-notice letter status to our additives by exact substance-name match, and hand-verify every match — and every individual notice's status — against the FDA's own published GRAS Notice Inventory record before publishing it.
Safety-review data sourced from the FDA's GRAS Notices program; not endorsed or certified by the FDA.
The FDA does not endorse foodindex.co or any conclusion we present alongside its GRAS Notices data.
EU Register of nutrition and health claims made on foods
EU Register of nutrition and health claims made on foods — licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
We show a claim on an ingredient page only when that ingredient's own USDA-sourced nutrient value clears the EU's 15%-of-Reference-Intake-per-100g “source of” threshold for the claimed nutrient (Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006) — never the claim on its own.
Health-claim wording and authorisation status sourced from the European Commission's Register of nutrition and health claims made on foods.
The European Commission does not endorse foodindex.co or the specific foods we show alongside its authorised health-claim wording.
Requesting our Open Food Facts–derived data
Our product pages are built from a database derived from Open Food Facts, so the Open Database License requires us to offer you that derived data. We satisfy this under ODbL section 4.6(b): the description of our alterations is in the Open Food Facts section above, and we will send you a free machine-readable file of the Open Food Facts–derived subset on request.
Email data@foodindex.co and we will reply with the file. There is no charge.
Improvements we make to the underlying database are shared back under the same licence. Our editorial text, verdict methodology, and site design are our own work and are not covered by these data licences.
Why percentages sometimes use different reference standards
Ingredient and whole-food pages show two kinds of percentage: a %DV in the Nutrition Facts section for macros (fat, carbs, protein, and the rest), and a %NRV in the Vitamins & Minerals section and in any EU-authorised health claims. These come from two different regulatory tables on purpose, not by mistake:
- %DV (Daily Value) is the US FDA's reference table, used on every US Nutrition Facts label.
- %NRV (Nutrient Reference Value) is the EU's reference table (Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Annex XIII), and is also what EU health-claim wording like “source of magnesium” is legally defined against.
The two tables use different reference amounts for several nutrients — magnesium's daily reference is 420mg under the US table but 375mg under the EU table, for example — so the same amount of a nutrient can produce two different, both-correct percentages depending on which standard is cited. We keep macros on %DV and vitamins/minerals on %NRV consistently across every page, so the same nutrient is never shown against two different standards in two places on the same page.
Something wrong?
Spotted wrong or missing product data? The fastest fix is editing the product directly on Open Food Facts — our pages pick up changes with the next data refresh.