fooddb-jp — Japanese Food Composition API

Why fooddb-jp?

Japanese food data, usable from anywhere — and from any language.

🤖

MCP Native

Speaks the Model Context Protocol. Connect Claude, Cursor or any agent with uvx fooddb-jp — the tools are described in English, so the agent knows when to reach for them.

🔍

Searchable in English

All 2,541 foods answer to an English name — common words (tofu, natto, soy sauce), romanized Japanese (konnyaku, ayu, kashiwamochi) and loanwords (artichoke). Japanese works too, of course.

🌏

INFOODS tagnames

Nutrients carry FAO/INFOODS identifiers (ENERC_KCAL, PROT-, VITC) — the same ones USDA FoodData Central uses, so results line up with other databases.

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Fast

86 µs per food lookup, 11,600 QPS. A read-only SQLite architecture — nothing to warm up.

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Nutrition maths, done for you

Pass a whole meal as food:grams pairs and get the totals. Photo → the model names the foods → the API adds them up.

🏛️

Official government data

The full 2023 edition published by Japan's MEXT: the main table plus amino acids, fatty acids and carbohydrates — all 11 tables.

⚡ Set up in three minutes

Install uv, paste the MCP config. That is the whole thing.

Step 1 — Install uv

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Step 2 — Add to mcp_config.json

{
  "fooddb-jp": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": ["fooddb-jp"],
    "env": {
      "FOODDB_API_KEY": "fdb_your_key_here"
    }
  }
}

REST API — curl works too

Examples

# search for a food (English or Japanese)
curl "https://fooddb.navii.online/foods/search/tofu"

# nutrients for one food, per 100 g
curl "https://fooddb.navii.online/foods/1004"

# add up a meal (100 g oatmeal + a 60 g egg)
curl "https://fooddb.navii.online/calculate?foods=1004:100,12004:60"

# foods richest in vitamin C
curl "https://fooddb.navii.online/ranking/VITC?limit=5"

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Where does the data come from?

The Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan, 2023 edition, published by MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). The source is public at the MEXT food composition database and may be reused under Japan's standard terms of use (equivalent to CC BY 4.0).

What are the limits on the free tier?

Every endpoint, 100 requests a day, no API key. Commercial use is fine within that.

How does billing work?

A monthly subscription through Stripe; credit and debit cards. Your API key is issued the moment the payment goes through. The daily counter resets at 00:00 UTC.

Can I cancel any time?

Yes. Cancel whenever; you keep access until the period you paid for ends. Use /billing/portal?email=your@email to reach the Stripe portal. The API key is deactivated when the subscription ends.

I lost my API key

Retrieve it with the email you paid with: /billing/key?email=your@email. It is also shown on the payment page — that page only, so copy it somewhere safe.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol — the standard by which an agent (Claude, Cursor, and others) reaches an external tool. uvx fooddb-jp hands your agent the whole composition table.

Is there an SLA?

Not at the moment. The service runs behind systemd and a Cloudflare Tunnel and stays up, but nothing is contractually promised. Get in touch if you need one.

This API is for looking up food composition data. Do not use it to make medical decisions. Accuracy follows the MEXT original, but conversion and structuring can introduce errors. Abuse of the API (flooding, reverse engineering) is not allowed. Fuller terms are being written.

Give your AI Japanese food.