Nutriely aims to provide the most complete tool to manage your nutrition. Unfortunately, at this time there is no single credible source that has all of the necessary data. Some sources have excellent nutritional profiles however very small databases. Some have huge amounts of foods but with very limited nutritional profiles.
The problem is that for most foods the data simply does not exist. It does not exist because it is expensive to analyse everything, and there are no laws that would enforce any structured nutritional profiles for all foods in the market.
Therefore our team is using multiple sources and performing extensive data processing to ensure high quality of data.
Fineli is a database maintained by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. The database consists of approximately 4000 foods which have been rigorously reviewed by our team. The strength of this database is its focus on base foods and quality of the micro nutrient data. The data is frequently updated and up to date.
FoodData Central is a project launched by USDA. It is an integrated, research-focused data system that provides expanded data on nutrients and other foods components. As mentioned in FAQ the nutritional values in FoodData Central are derived through chemical analyses, computations and other approaches. Unfortunately, only a few hundred of the thousands of foods have been chemically analysed. Instead most of the foods are using the other approaches like surveys and manufacturer submissions where the data quality drops significantly. Nevertheless this is the biggest database in the market and some of the information can not be found anywhere else.
Given that the currently available data is very incomplete Nutriely has worked on improving the availability of advanced nutritional profiles. Our team has developed a machine learning algorithm to advance nutritional data accessibility for products that have only limited profiles. The algorithm itself is the property of Nutriely and is not opensource, however we are willing to work with other institutions interested in it. You can preview the simplified version of the algorithm in our Recipe Engineer tool. The algorithm is used to reverse engineer recipes based on the ingredients and available nutritional profiles. Using this algorithm we can ensure that we have a reasonable estimation of minerals and vitamins based on the ingredients for foods.
The data used in our website is reviewed by our nutrition team and verified before publishing. Nutrition science is always advancing and we update our data with newest information available.