A chunk of our nutrition database is from the publicly available USDA database, which is a great resource. The USDA publishes an updated version every year or so, with more data points and new ingredients.

We recently went through the process of updating to the latest version, which I have to say went pretty smoothly after a lot of preparation, research and code. I’m almost looking forward to the next update now that we put in all this legwork.

Changes and Customization to the Database

I wish we could just take the USDA database wholesale and plug it into ReciPal. I suppose we could, but it wouldn’t make as good an experience for you.

We do a few things to update it, improve the data quality, and clean it for food businesses. For example, there are a lot of restaurant, pre-packaged and baby foods that would never be inputs in a food company's products. We remove those from our database so that it doesn’t get cluttered.

I could go on about ways we improved it, but you probably have better things to do. The bottom line is that we now have the latest version of the USDA database on ReciPal and have a great process in place for future updates.