Nutritionix API
✓ Official Vendor SpecData EnrichmentData TransformationapiKey7 EndpointsREST
For Agents
Turn natural-language food and exercise descriptions into structured nutrition and calorie data, plus search a verified database of common, branded, and restaurant foods.
Use for: I need to log a meal described in plain English and get its calories, Estimate how many calories I burned running for 30 minutes, Search for a branded protein bar in the Nutritionix database, Get the nutrient breakdown for a UPC barcode
Not supported: Does not handle meal-plan generation, grocery delivery, or fitness device sync — use for nutrition lookup and natural-language meal and exercise parsing only.
The Nutritionix API exposes a verified nutrition database covering common foods, branded packaged products, and restaurant menu items, with detailed macro and micronutrient breakdowns. Its standout feature is natural-language parsing — a developer can send a phrase like '2 eggs and a slice of toast' and receive structured nutrient data back, alongside the same treatment for exercise calorie estimation. It also exposes instant search for foods, lookup by item or UPC, and a directory of restaurant locations and brands. The surface is small at seven endpoints, which makes it well suited to nutrition logging, fitness coaching, and meal-planning agents.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the Nutritionix API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Nutritionix API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with Nutritionix API.
Parse natural-language meal descriptions into per-food macro and micronutrient values
Estimate calories burned for natural-language exercise descriptions using user weight and duration
Run instant typeahead-style search across common, branded, and restaurant foods
Look up a specific food item by Nutritionix ID or UPC barcode
Retrieve the master list of nutrient codes used across responses
Find restaurant locations near a coordinate or postcode for menu-aware recommendations
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Nutritionix API for, with concrete tasks.
★ Natural-Language Food Logging
Power a nutrition-tracking app or chatbot that accepts free-text meal entries — for example 'a banana and a cup of oat milk' — and returns calories, macronutrients, and serving information per food. Nutritionix handles the tokenisation, quantity parsing, and nutrient lookup against its verified database, so the developer does not need a custom NLP pipeline. Setup is typically under a day with the natural-language endpoint and an x-app-id/x-app-key pair.
Send POST /natural/nutrients with the query 'two scrambled eggs and avocado toast' and return total calories and protein.
Exercise Calorie Estimation
Estimate calories burned for free-text exercise descriptions like '30 minutes of cycling' using weight, age, and gender to scale results. This is well suited to fitness journaling apps, coaching agents, and wearable companion experiences that need a quick estimate without bundling a metabolic-equation library. The endpoint accepts the same conversational style as the food parser, keeping the integration consistent.
Send POST /natural/exercise with 'ran 5 km in 28 minutes' and a weight of 75 kg, then return the estimated calories burned.
Restaurant Menu Lookups
Build a recommendation flow that helps users pick lower-calorie items at chain restaurants by searching foods filtered to a specific brand and pulling locations nearby. Nutritionix indexes thousands of branded restaurant items, so an agent can answer 'what are the lightest menu items at Sweetgreen?' with structured nutrient data rather than scraped HTML.
Call GET /search/instant with 'sweetgreen kale caesar', then GET /search/item to retrieve the full nutrient profile for the top match.
Agent-Driven Nutrition Coaching
Let an AI agent answer 'how many calories were in what I just ate?' by chaining the natural-nutrients endpoint with item lookups, all behind a single intent. Through Jentic, the agent searches by intent and gets only the operations it needs, with API credentials handled by the platform.
Search Jentic for 'log a meal in natural language', load the operation, and return total kilojoules for the user's lunch description.
Key Endpoints
7 endpoints — the nutritionix api exposes a verified nutrition database covering common foods, branded packaged products, and restaurant menu items, with detailed macro and micronutrient breakdowns.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
POST
/natural/nutrients
Parse a natural-language meal into nutrients
POST
/natural/exercise
Estimate calories burned from a natural-language exercise
GET
/search/instant
Instant food search across common and branded items
GET
/search/item
Look up an item by Nutritionix ID or UPC
GET
/locations
Search restaurant locations near a coordinate
GET
/brands/{brandId}
Retrieve brand details by ID
POST
/natural/nutrients
Parse a natural-language meal into nutrients
POST
/natural/exercise
Estimate calories burned from a natural-language exercise
GET
/search/instant
Instant food search across common and branded items
GET
/search/item
Look up an item by Nutritionix ID or UPC
GET
/locations
Search restaurant locations near a coordinate
GET
/brands/{brandId}
Retrieve brand details by ID
Why Jentic?
Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.
Credential isolation
Both x-app-id and x-app-key are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive scoped access — neither header value is exposed to the agent's context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic with phrases like 'log a meal in natural language' or 'estimate calories burned'. Jentic returns the matching operation and its input schema so the agent can call the correct endpoint without browsing the docs.
Time to first call
Direct integration: 1-2 days for header auth, request shaping, and response normalisation. Through Jentic: under an hour — search, load, execute.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using Nutritionix API through Jentic.
What authentication does the Nutritionix API use?
The API requires two API key headers: x-app-id and x-app-key, issued from the Nutritionix developer dashboard. There is no OAuth flow — both values are sent on every call. Through Jentic, both keys live in the encrypted vault and are injected at execution time so the agent never holds them directly.
Can I parse a free-text meal into nutrients?
Yes. Send the text in the 'query' field of POST /natural/nutrients and the API returns one foods entry per recognised item with calories, macronutrients, and serving information. The same pattern applies to POST /natural/exercise for workout descriptions.
What are the rate limits for the Nutritionix API?
The OpenAPI spec does not embed explicit limits. Free developer keys are throttled to a low daily call ceiling and the team's published policy is to upgrade to a paid plan for higher throughput. Treat HTTP 429 as a signal to back off.
How do I look up a barcode through Jentic?
Run pip install jentic, then search for 'look up a food by UPC'. Jentic returns GET /search/item with its input schema; pass the upc parameter and execute. The x-app-id and x-app-key headers are attached automatically from your stored credentials at https://app.jentic.com/sign-up.
Does the API include exercise tracking?
Yes — POST /natural/exercise estimates calories burned from a free-text description such as 'biked for 45 minutes', adjusted by user weight, age, height, and gender supplied in the request body.
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