FoodData Central MCP Server

An MCP server that exposes the USDA FoodData Central database — search foods, look up nutrient data by FDC ID, and find the canonical version of a food name without wading through thousands of near-duplicate manufacturer entries.

Not affiliated with the USDA. Food composition data is public domain (U.S. Government work); see Attribution below.

Quickstart

Add this to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fooddata-central": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@trellis-labs/fooddata-central-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FDC_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Claude Desktop, this goes in claude_desktop_config.json (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows).

Get an API key

Sign up for a free key at fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide — takes about a minute, no credit card. A registered key gets you 1,000 requests/hour.

Don't want to sign up right now? Use FDC_API_KEY=DEMO_KEY — USDA's shared demo key works immediately with no signup, limited to 30 requests/hour. Fine for trying the server out; get a real key before relying on it for regular use.

The cheddar problem (why find_food exists)

Search "cheddar cheese" directly against FDC's full catalog and you get 64,784 hits. Page 1 is ten near-identical Branded entries — different grocery chains' private-label cheddar, none of them the food you actually meant:

CHEDDAR CHEESE | Grafton Village Cheese Co, LLC
CHEDDAR CHEESE | Three Square Inc. (Crystal Farms)
CHEDDAR CHEESE | Weis Markets, Inc.
CHEDDAR CHEESE | Weis Markets, Inc.
CHEDDAR CHEESE | Weis Markets, Inc.
... (5 more brands, same product)

The canonical, lab-analyzed answer — Cheese, cheddar (FDC 328637, Foundation) — is nowhere on that page.

find_food("cheddar cheese") returns it first:

Best match for "cheddar cheese":
FDC ID: 328637 | Name: Cheese, cheddar | Type: Foundation
Nutrient summary: Carbohydrate: 2.44 G | Energy: 408 KCAL | Protein: 23.3 G | ...
Use get_food(fdcId: 328637) for the full nutrient breakdown.

Alternates:
FDC ID: 746767 | Name: Cheese, swiss | Type: Foundation
...

It does this by preferring Foundation (USDA lab-analyzed) and SR Legacy (classic reference) data over Branded (manufacturer-submitted) noise, and only falling back to Branded results if nothing else matches or you explicitly ask for it (includeBranded: true).

Tools

find_food

Find the best canonical match for a food name. This is the tool to reach for first when you just want "the" answer for a food, not a list to sift through.

• Input: name (string, required), includeBranded (boolean, optional, default false)
• Output: best match with FDC ID + key-nutrient summary, up to 3 alternates, and a one-line note when normalization/aliasing or a Branded fallback was used.
• Handles plurals, common prep words ("sliced onion" → "onion"), and a small table of food-identity aliases for less common ingredient names (e.g. "paneer" → "paneer cheese", "nori" → "seaweed sheets").
• No LLM calls happen inside this tool — it's a search/ranking pipeline. The calling model (you) is the disambiguation layer if the top match still isn't quite right; use the alternates or search_foods for more control.

search_foods

Search FDC by keyword. Full control over data type, brand owner, and pagination — use this when you want to see the raw candidate list rather than a single resolved answer.

• Input: query (required), dataType, pageSize (1-50, default 10), pageNumber, brandOwner.
• Data type guidance: prefer Foundation and SR Legacy over Branded unless you specifically need manufacturer nutrition-label data. `Surv

... View full README on GitHub