A hosted Open Food Facts API alternative with higher limits and the same open data
Open Food Facts is where this data comes from, and the project deserves the credit: a community database of food products under the Open Database License. Its public API asks for a custom User-Agent, allows 15 product reads and 10 searches per minute per IP, and points anyone needing more than a few hundred products to the bulk exports. The Barcode Lookup API is that bulk export, loaded into a database built for lookups and search, refreshed daily, served with the attribution the licence requires, and without a per-minute cap.
| What | Open Food Facts API | Barcode Lookup API |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free; reads need no key, only a User-Agent in the form AppName/Version (email) (as published). | 500 tokens a month, no card; one lookup costs 1 token. |
| Rate limits | 15 product reads and 10 searches per minute per IP; bulk needs should use the exports (as published). | No per-minute cap on paid plans; the monthly token allowance is the only limit. |
| Licence | Database under the ODbL, contents under the DbCL, images CC BY-SA 3.0 (as published). | Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts, Open Products Facts and Open Pet Food Facts, community databases under the Open Database License. Attribution is returned with every product. |
| Coverage | Food products; sister projects cover beauty, pet food and other products. | Food, beauty, pet food and general products in one lookup, 4.3 million barcodes. |
| Freshness | Live community database. | Daily delta refresh from the Open Facts exports. |
Facts about Open Food Facts API were read from its own pages on October 29, 2026. If something has changed since, tell us and we will update the page. Sources: Open Food Facts API docs.
Reasons to pick Barcode Lookup API
- Search that is built for an app: name, brand, category, country, Nutri-Score and NOVA filters with pagination, instead of the project's general-purpose search.
- One lookup across the food, beauty, pet food and products databases, with zero-padding and format variants handled for you.
- No per-IP minute limit, which matters the moment your app has more than a handful of users scanning at once.
- The attribution block is in every response, so staying within the Open Database License is the default.
When Open Food Facts API is still the better choice
- You contribute data back: writing products, images or edits goes through Open Food Facts itself.
- You need fields beyond the ones this API exposes, or the very latest edit minutes after it was made.
Try it with your key
The first endpoint of the API as a curl command. Create a free key and paste it in. (Catalogue Stats, 1 token).
curl "https://api-barcode-lookup.dataandapis.com/v1/products/stats" \
-H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"Plans
Free 500 tokens a month · Starter $6.99 for 25,000 · Pro $24.99 for 150,000 · Ultra $99.99 for 1,000,000. Every plan covers every API.
Questions people ask
- Is this just a copy of Open Food Facts?
- It is the Open Facts data, loaded daily, served from an index built for barcode lookups and filtered search, with the licence attribution preserved. The value is the hosting, limits and query shape, not different data.
- Does it respect the Open Database License?
- Yes. The licence requires attribution alongside the data, and every product response carries it. Your app should display it too.
- Can I get the images?
- Each product includes the front image URL served by Open Food Facts.
One key, 128 APIs, free to start
500 tokens a month without a card. Most calls cost one token.
Create a free account