About Edacious FoodData

Edacious FoodData is a public database of the nutritional content of food, built by aggregating information from multiple sources—including our own laboratory.

It’s designed to illuminate nutritional variability and help people more easily understand the health context of what we eat.

This is a starting point. We plan to regularly add features to help pull out insights, integrate additional datasets, and add primary data straight from our laboratory.

A focus on variability in food

Most people outside farming and food manufacturing assume food is homogeneous—that "an apple is an apple." In reality, nutritional content varies dramatically. The FDA even permits a 20% margin of error on Nutrition Facts labels to account for natural agricultural fluctuations.

Which nutrients vary the most? By how much? Which foods are most variable? We hope this website can shed some light on that.

When we treat food as a uniform commodity, we erase incentives to grow higher-quality food and ignore potential systemic declines in nutrient density.

By making variability transparent, we aim to accelerate conversations on how to cultivate healthier food.

Data Sources

While no single dataset can represent everything on the market, we’re starting with a strong baseline: USDA’s FoodData Central. Our Foods database is a superset of the USDA: that is, we start with the USDA and add additional primary data when available, adding breadth and depth to the existing dataset.

USDA & Public Data

Our current USDA listings display the latest records from the USDA FoodData Central Foundation Foods database. Additional USDA data (such as SR Legacy) may be included in our aggregate Foods, but those are not currently searchable.

Moving forward, we plan to integrate global datasets to reflect international agricultural landscapes.

Partner with us: Interested in bringing a dataset to the public? Please reach out.

Edacious Primary Datasets

These results come from our ISO-17025 laboratory, or vetted partner labs. Much of this data is generated from retail food samples that our team has purchased, analyzed, and used to construct anonymous datasets for comparative research. Edacious never publishes any identifiable product or brand data without the consent of the producer, though anonymized data may be included in these sets.

Learn more about Edacious Benchmark Data →

If you’re interested in accessing more details about Edacious primary data, please reach out.

Product & Brand Data

Published Products data comes directly from our lab and the brands that choose to work with us. They control whether or not the results of their tests are published (see our Conflict of Interest statement below).

If you’re interested in testing or want to see your product or brand represented here, Get Started →

About Edacious

Edacious, a Public Benefit Corporation, is an independent partner for trust and transparency in food. Through accredited lab testing and an integrated data platform, Edacious verifies nutrient quality and safety, benchmarks results against regulatory and market standards, and delivers verified proof that brands and producers can put in front of retailers, buyers, and consumers. We hope to transform how the world measures, verifies, and communicates food quality.

Conflict of interest

Transparency starts with us: as a public benefit corporation, we need to make money to continue to operate and grow (when we grow, we believe we can do more good), yet we hold ourselves to a “dual bottom line” of serving in the public’s benefit. What this means concretely: we get paid by food producers to test food and help them interpret the results.

What this means for you:

• The Products section of this website is funded by our customers. We define the type of content they’re allowed to publish, but we also give them control over what they publish. Producers choose what to publish and may omit data as they see fit, but we do not allow them to publish false or misleading data.
• The Foods section of this site includes data from public sources, like the USDA, and from our primary datasets—including some anonymized customer data. It’s published to help the public have a more transparent view of the market of food. All published data is either sourced from a public dataset (USDA) or comes from an accredited ISO-17025 lab (Edacious or a partner).

Note: research data from other non-accredited labs may be found in Notebooks, which are a feature of our Pro Platform used for visualizing research, but is not mixed into Foods data. Notebooks are not currently listed on this site.