Spoonacular

About Spoonacular

Spoonacular is a food and recipe API built on a food ontology that models relationships between ingredients, recipes, nutrition, and allergens. The database covers over 2,600 ingredients, 5,000 recipes, 600,000 products, and 115,000 menu items from over 800 American restaurant chains. Data available per category includes nutrition and price information, cooking tips, substitutions and conversions, cost breakdowns, wine pairings, and product/menu search.

The API automatically analyzes recipes for common allergens (wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, nuts) and determines compliance with diets such as vegan, vegetarian, Paleo, and Whole30, computing nutritional information through a proprietary algorithm. It supports semantic recipe search, ingredient-based search ("what's in your fridge"), recipe extraction from websites, cuisine classification, meal plan and shopping list generation, UPC lookup for American grocery products, food-related named entity recognition in text, and an MCP server for building AI tools.

It is intended for developers building recipe management tools, meal planning apps, shoppable recipe experiences, and other food-related applications. Access is offered through a $10/month academic or hackathon plan providing up to 5,000 requests per day, granted after manual review; a free API key is also available.

Key features

• Semantic recipe search with natural-language filters like ingredients and dietary restrictions
• Automatic recipe analysis for allergens, diets (vegan, vegetarian, Paleo, Whole30), and nutrition
• Meal planning with automatic daily nutrition calculation and shopping list generation
• Ingredient, product, and menu item database with nutrition, pricing, and substitution data
• UPC lookup for American grocery products and nutrition data for 800+ restaurant chains
• Recipe extraction from websites and food-related text/NER detection

Frequently asked questions