Updates

New to the API: More UPCs, Better Servers

If you use our Search Grocery Products by UPC endpoint, you will be excited to learn we have expanded our coverage from 1 million to over 3 million UPCs! We hope this will be a big improvement for all users building meal planning and food tracking apps.

We also made some changes to our server infrastructure. You should experience better performance and fewer latencies.

Other Improvements

You will also find a couple new parameters:

• Our price breakdown widget can now be requested as 2 separate images by using the "mode" parameter shown above.
• Ingredient Search and Autocomplete Ingredient Search now support searching for ingredients in German using the language parameter. If you have your own German-language recipe database, many of our API functionalities are available to you.

NodePit nodes

We are happy to be featured among companies like Dropbox and Spotify in NodePit's featured products.

You can search NodePit for KNIME nodes and workflows for all your projects, or you can tap into our nodes here.

Restaurant Search Endpoint

With our new Search Restaurants endpoint (in partnership with MealMe), you can search through thousands of restaurants (in North America) by location, cuisine, budget, and more.

In the response, you will get valuable data, such as the address, opening hours, whether they deliver, and more.

Other Improvements

By your request, the diet parameter in Search Recipes now supports AND and OR logic. Provide a list of diets separated by a comma for AND (gluten free,vegetarian) and provide a list separated by a pipe for OR (vegan|vegetarian).

We have added a GET endpoint to generate a recipe card.

ingredientId is now returned in the Classify Grocery Product response

You can now use "x-api-key" in your header instead of "apiKey" in the URL

Our responses now include the number of points you have left as "X-API-Quota-Left". See our quotas page for more information.

the Nutrition by ID endpoint now provides richer data, including a full macro- and micronutrient breakdown, flavonoid content, and more. With these exciting changes comes the following deprecation notice:

The structure of the response for Nutrition by ID has changed significantly, please check the new response in the docs. Calories, carbs, fat, protein, bad, good will be removed in their previous form on June 30, 2023!

New to the API: Nutrition Labels

It might be scary to know how many calories or how much sugar is in your favorite Halloween treats, but we decided to add an endpoint that will generate a nutrition label for recipes, grocery products, and menu items anyway!

Simply send the relevant ID in your request and receive an HTML response back containing a label like what is shown on the left.

All Widgets as Images

If HTML widgets are not working for you, you can now get all our widgets—ingredient list, equipment list, price breakdown, nutrition chart or nutrition label, and more—returned from the API as images as well. Just search our documentation for "widget image" to see all the new endpoints.

Other Improvements

If you like our recipe taste endpoint, you might be glad to learn that you can now use the parameter "includeTaste" with the endpoints Analyze Recipe and Extract Recipe from Website.

We have also expanded our popular meal planning API endpoints. You can now use our API to create meal plans without using our meal planner on spoonacular.com.

Our new addProductInformation and addMenuItemInformation parameters allow you to get the full product/menu item data right from the search results, making it unnecessary to query the API again for more detailed information.

Flavonoids

Flavonoids are compounds found in many fruit and vegetables that have numerous health benefits. Now when you use the API get the nutritional information of individual ingredients and full recipes, you will be shown the flavonoid content as well.

"nutrition": {
        "flavanoids": [           
            {
                "name": "Catechin",
                "amount": 3.56,
                "unit": "mg"
            },
            {
                "name": "Epigallocatechin",
                "amount": 19.0,
                "unit": "mg"
            },
            {
                "name": "Epicatechin",
                "amount": 5.03,
                "unit": "mg"
            },           
            {
                "name": "Gallocatechin",
                "amount": 2.95,
                "unit": "mg"
            }
            ...
        ],
}

Taste and Flavor Analysis and Widget

Data can be dry. A creative and explanatory visual can add the flavor you need. Our newest widget lets you Visualize Recipe Taste by ID:

You can also generate this widget by sending an ingredient list.

Prefer just cold hard facts? Get the pure data here. Feel free to play with the code available on our GitHub (https://github.com/ddsky/spoonacular-widgets) too.

More New Endpoints

We have taken some of our existing technology and applied it to new endpoints to better suit your use cases.

Compute Ingredient Amount

Ever wonder how much of a certain food you would have to eat to get a certain amout of vitamins, fiber, protein, etc.? Our new Compute Ingredient Amount endpoint can answer these questions for you. Simply provide the ingredient ID, the target nutrient, and the amount of this nutrient you want to reach. The API will do the rest.

Analyze Recipe

This new endpoint allows you to send raw recipe information, such as title, servings, and ingredients, to then see what we compute (badges, diets, nutrition, and all the tasty morsels you expect from our API!) This is useful if you have your own recipe data and want to enrich it with our semantic analysis.

Ingredient Search

This new endpoint is like giving our existing ingredient search growth hormones. Now you can find ingredients while setting macronutrient filters and sorting if you need more control than our existing autocomplete ingredient search offers.

Get Recipe Card

You can now get recipe cards by their id and don't have to send all the data yourself if the recipe is part of the spoonacular recipe database.

Compute Shopping List

Need to add broccoli to your shopping list, but don't need to make a full meal plan? No problem! Our new Compute Shopping List endpoint will return a shopping list if you send a list of ingredients. 1 head of broccoli, 1 bag broccoli slaw, 1 can cream of broccoli soup? You do you.

What else?

• Deprecation Notice (by December 31st, 2021): Nutrition.nutrients.title, Nutrition.flavanoids.title and Nutrition.properties.title => will be renamed to "name". Every field called "metaInformation" in the response (not in requests) will be called "meta". Every field "originalString" will be removed.
• We have greatly improved recipe extraction and parsing.

Glycemic Index Data

We now have glycemic index and glycemic load data for many ingredients and can compute the total glycemic load for multiple ingredients or a recipe. Check out the dedicated endpoint or just find the data that is now added to the "nutrition" object called "properties", e.g.

"nutrition": {
         "properties": [
            {
                "title": "Glycemic Index",
                "amount": 13.92,
                "unit": ""
            },
            {
                "title": "Glycemic Load",
                "amount": 8.92,
                "unit": ""
            }
        ],
}

Widget Example Code

We have updated all the widget endpoints for visualizing recipe nutrition, equipment, price breakdown, and ingredients and you can use the "play" button in the docs to preview the widgets.

Furthermore, you can find fully working example code that you can copy to your projects which we host on GitHub here: https://github.com/ddsky/spoonacular-widgets

Meal Planning API Updates

In our last release, we introduced our new meal planning API and we were surprised how many of you adopted it so quickly! From the feedback we received we added and improved a couple endpoints:

• You can add all meals from a certain meal plan template to a user's meal plan with just one API call, see: Add to Meal Plan.
• You can now clear an entire meal planned day with just one API call, see: Clear Meal Plan Day.
• Instead of preloading an entire week of planned meals (which can be quite a big json response), you can now load individual days, see: Get Meal Plan Day.
• Instead of adding meals one by one, you can now pass a list of items to add to the meal planner in a single call, see: Add to Meal Plan.

What else is new?

In our last release, we introduced our new meal planning API and we were surprised how many of you adopted it so quickly! From the feedback we received we added and improved a couple endpoints:

• You can now search ALL kinds of food, even videos and articles, in a single endpoint.
• We have published a short guide explaining the wines currently covered by our database. This data is relevant for all wine-related endpoints.

Meal Planning API

We receive a lot of requests from users who want to build their own meal planning tools. To help you achieve this, we have added 11 new endpoints to our API, including Add/Delete from Meal Plan, Get Meal Plan Week, Generate Shopping List, and other highly requested endpoints.

These endpoints are closely connected to our meal planner on spoonacular.com. You can find out more here: https://spoonacular.com/food-api/docs#Working-with-the-Meal-Planner

What else is new?

• We created a new parameter "addRecipeNutrition" which adds the nutritional information to the recipe search results without needing to call Get Recipe Information for every recipe returned.
• Get Recipe Information now includes "summary" - an automatically generated text to describe the recipe.
• We have improved menu item nutrition.
• RapidAPI published a great article a few months back. If you missed it, here it is: How to Create a Food Website (using the spoonacular API)

New Image Classifier

We have been working on a new set of functionalities that allow you to classify food pictures! Our model is trained on over 15,000 images in 50 classes with a focus on dishes that you can get in a restaurant, such as burgers, fish and chips, and lasagna. To train our model, we picked professional photographs and pictures taken by actual restaurant visitors - see how different these two categories are?

Model Accuracy

How good is our model? After extensive training and evaluation we reached just above 90% accuracy. We also researched other classifiers and studied how well Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other companies focused on image classification work on our dataset. Here's the comparison if you're interested: https://spoonacular.com/food-api/docs#Image-Classification

Recipe Search

We have been working on the speed of the recipe search. The new Complex Recipe Search endpoint is now five times faster.

You can now also sort recipes by a large list of criteria, such as by any macro- or micronutrient, cooking time, price, meta-score, or just random.

The nutritional information for each recipe now also contains the weight per serving:

"weightPerServing": {
    "amount": 269,
    "unit": "g"
}

Additionally, the nutritional information also includes net carbs, which is defined in the API as total carbohydrates minus the fiber content.

Autocomplete Ingredients

When requesting meta-information from the autocomplete ingredient endpoint, you can now also request a list of possible units for any given ingredient.

For example, if your app allows users to enter ingredients, you might want to let them enter 3 slices of apple instead of just 1 oz of apple. The possible units tell you whether the API recognizes the unit (e.g. slices) and can compute the nutrition correctly. The API does not know "slices" for, say, peanuts, so it is beneficial to let your user only pick units that can be understood.

Grocery Products

Information about grocery products now contains all the nutritional information we have for a product, not just macronutrients. Additionally, we added a description of the product if available and attempt to guess the supermarket aisle where you would expect to find the product.

New Resources & Your Feedback

We have published a list of the top 1,000 ingredients used in recipes and their spoonacular ingredient ids here.

All our SDKs have been recompiled, so make sure you update your SDK if you are using an older one.