“We have all stood in a supermarket aisle looking at a bag of spinach or a packet of lentils and wondered how nutritious they are. How much iron does spinach contain? Which grains offer the most protein? For researchers and public health teams, answering those questions at scale — across thousands of fruits, vegetables, and grains at once — has never been easy. Two new tools from our Food and Nutrition National Biosciences Research Infrastructure (FN-NBRI) are changing that.

Introducing new digital tools to access nutritional data

We have developed two new digital tools, known as APIs, that provide a fast and reliable way for anyone working with food and nutrition data to access two important UK datasets.
An API (Application Programming Interface) might sound technical, but think of it like a waiter in a restaurant. You do not go into the kitchen yourself — you tell the waiter what you want, and they bring it back to you. An API does the same thing with data: you ask for the information you need, and it delivers it instantly, in a format that computers can read and use.

The first tool, the CoFID API, connects to McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID) — the gold standard reference for the nutritional composition of foods consumed in the UK. The CoFID dataset contains detailed nutritional profiles for more than 2,000 foods, covering everything from energy and protein to vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and beyond.

The second tool, the Food Labelling API, gives access to UK food labelling data — the information you would see on the back of a food packet. For each of its more than 2,000 foods, it provides energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, starch, fibre, protein, and salt — the full set of nutrients required under UK nutrition labelling rules.

Both APIs were built by our FN-NBRI team here at the Quadram Institute, and both are now available to researchers, developers, and public health professionals who want to work with this data programmatically — that is, automatically, through code, rather than by hand.

Speeding up science through APIs

Before these tools existed, accessing nutritional data at scale was difficult. Researchers would download large spreadsheets, manually clean data, and write one-off scripts just to answer a single question. If they wanted to update their analysis with the latest data, they would have to start the process all over again.

This kind of friction slows science down. It creates barriers for smaller teams and independent researchers who do not have the time or resources to work through raw datasets. And it means the same work gets repeated, again and again, across different organisations.

We wanted to change that. By making this data available through an API, we can help the people who use it focus on the science, not the data handling.

Helping nutritionists access information quicker

Our new digital tools are designed for anyone working with food and nutrition data in a research or public health context.

Nutrition researchers can use the CoFID API to quickly pull detailed nutrient profiles for hundreds of foods at once, compare nutrient levels across food groups, or identify which foods are the richest sources of a particular vitamin or mineral. Work that might have taken hours of manual data handling can now be done in a fraction of the time.

Public health teams can build dashboards or automated reports that draw on UK nutritional data, helping them monitor dietary patterns or investigate the nutritional impact of changes in food supply.

Students and educators in nutrition, dietetics, and food science can use the APIs to explore real-world data as part of their studies, gaining hands-on experience with the kind of tools used in professional research.

What does it look like in practice?

Imagine a public health researcher studying vitamin D deficiency — a genuine concern in the UK, where sunlight exposure is limited for much of the year. Using the CoFID API, they could instantly retrieve a ranked list of all foods in the dataset ordered by their vitamin D content. Within seconds, they have a clear picture of which foods contribute most — oily fish such as herring and salmon are among the richest sources, along with egg yolk — without opening a single spreadsheet.

Or consider a researcher investigating iron deficiency — one of the most common nutritional deficiencies in the UK. Rather than manually working through food composition tables, they can use the API to instantly rank all foods in the dataset by their iron content. The data confirms that liver, fortified breakfast cereals, eggs, and red meat are among the richest everyday sources — information that is there, structured, and ready to use in seconds.

For researchers working with food labelling data, querying a specific food such as cheddar cheese returns the full back-of-pack nutritional profile — energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, fibre, protein, and salt — instantly, without any manual data extraction.

These are just a handful of examples. The real potential lies in how researchers and public health professionals will use these tools in ways we have not yet imagined.

Improving public health

Good food and nutrition data, made easily accessible, has the potential to improve public health research. When researchers can work faster and more efficiently, they can answer more questions. When that evidence is built on reliable, nationally recognised data, the findings carry greater weight.

BothAPIs are available for academic research, non-profit public health initiatives, and educational use, under a non-commercial licence that keeps this nationally important data accessible to the research community.

The UK has a long history of rigorous food composition research — McCance and Widdowson’s work dates back to the 1940s. These new tools help bring that legacy into the digital age, making decades of carefully collected data available in a form that modern research can use.

If you are interested in using the CoFID API or the Food Labelling API, you can explore the interactive documentation online. No prior technical knowledge is required to browse what is available.

To get access, get in touch with our FN-NBRI team.

The UK nutritional data is there. Now it is easier than ever to use it.”