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Data source

Every nutrition number in Trophic traces back to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central – the public dataset the USDA maintains as the reference for the nutrient composition of foods sold and prepared in the United States.

What's in Trophic's library

Trophic's ingredient library is a manually curated subset of FoodData Central. We don't expose every food in FDC – there are hundreds of thousands of entries, many of them niche or duplicative. Instead, we pick the canonical entry for each common ingredient a home cook is likely to reach for, and we map it to a clean, searchable name.

Each ingredient in Trophic's library:

  • Maps to exactly one food in FoodData Central.
  • Carries that food's full nutrient profile, unmodified.
  • Distinguishes raw from cooked where USDA tracks them separately, because cooking changes water content and therefore everything-per-gram.

What's not in Trophic's library

  • Branded and restaurant dishes. Trophic is geared towards people cooking with raw ingredients, so packaged products and restaurant meals are out of scope.
  • Anything we'd have to make up. If FDC doesn't carry a food, we don't add it with a guess. We'd rather be missing an ingredient than wrong about one. If something you need is missing, email us and we'll add it if we can map it to FDC.

How accurate is it?

USDA's values are best-effort estimates of what's in a given food. The real chicken breast on your counter is not the exact chicken breast USDA analyzed – it depends on the bird, the farm, the cut, the day. Nutrition data is always an approximation.

What Trophic guarantees is that the approximation comes from a single, reputable, traceable source – not from us, not from a model, not from a smoothed average across a dozen apps.

If you have a medical condition, an allergy, or a precise dietary requirement, treat the numbers in Trophic the way you'd treat any nutrition label: useful for planning, not a substitute for talking to a doctor or a registered dietitian.

Attribution

USDA asks that consumers of FoodData Central cite the dataset as follows:

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, 2019. fdc.nal.usda.gov.

We do that here, and we're grateful the data is public. Trophic exists because USDA does the underlying work.

Found a mistake?

Numbers in Trophic should match what FDC publishes. If you spot something that doesn't, email us – please include the ingredient name and what you're seeing. We treat data corrections as priority work.