Where NutrientOS food data comes from

USDA FoodData Central

The United States Department of Agriculture's public food composition database. It is the strongest source available for whole and minimally processed foods — laboratory-analysed records covering a wide set of vitamins and minerals rather than only label-required nutrients.

• •Best for raw ingredients, meat, produce, grains, dairy, and anything cooked at home from components.
• •Weaker for branded packaged products, which are covered inconsistently and can lag reformulations.
• •Caveat values are representative averages for a food, not measurements of the specific item you are eating. Variety, soil, season, and storage all move real content.

Open Food Facts

A collaborative, open database of packaged food products, contributed and maintained by its community. It is what makes barcode scanning work across a wide range of regional and own-brand products that no single commercial database covers.

• •Best for barcode lookups on packaged products, including regional and supermarket own-brand lines.
• •Weaker for micronutrients. Most entries carry only what appears on the label, so unmeasured vitamins and minerals are common — and are shown as unknown, not zero.
• •Caveat because entries are community-contributed, quality varies. A barcode can also point at a formulation the manufacturer has since changed.

Official restaurant nutrition data

For covered restaurants, NutrientOS uses nutrition figures published by the restaurant itself rather than crowd-sourced approximations.

• •Best for large chains that publish complete menu nutrition.
• •Weaker for independent restaurants, which generally publish nothing. NutrientOS does not invent data to fill those gaps.
• •Caveat published values are specification averages. Real preparation varies by location and by portioning, and menus change faster than any database tracks.

Your own foods and recipes

Foods you create, recipes you build, and corrections you make are stored against your account and take precedence for you. If you weigh and enter something yourself, that is the most accurate record in the system for your diary — nobody else's average beats your own measurement.

How sources are combined

A search can return candidates from more than one source. NutrientOS shows where a record came from so you can weigh it: a laboratory-analysed whole-food record and a community-contributed packaged record are not equally strong evidence, and the app does not pretend otherwise.

Where a record is missing values, they stay missing. Nothing is back-filled from a similar food, and no absent nutrient is silently converted into a zero.

No endorsement is implied

Naming these sources describes where data comes from. It does not imply that the USDA, Open Food Facts, or any restaurant endorses, sponsors, reviews, or is affiliated with NutrientOS. Each source is used under its own terms, and each remains the authority on its own data.