Data sources and attribution

Effective July 21, 2026 · The credit and licence notice for MacroPair's food catalog

MacroPair did not build a food database from scratch. Almost nobody does — the good ones are public, and two of them do the heavy lifting here. This page names them, links them, and states the licence each one carries, because that is what those licences ask for and because you deserve to know where the numbers on your screen came from.

Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is a non-profit, crowd-sourced database of packaged food from around the world, built by volunteers who photograph labels and type in what they say. Most of the barcodes MacroPair scans resolve against it — both from the copy we refresh in bulk and from live lookups when you scan something we have not seen before.

The database is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; its individual contents are made available under the Database Contents License (DbCL) v1.0. Product data © Open Food Facts contributors. Their own terms of use set out what re-users like us owe them.

Open Food Facts does not endorse MacroPair, is not affiliated with us, and is not responsible for anything we do with the data. If MacroPair shows a wrong number, that is ours to answer for, not theirs. They are a donation-funded non-profit and worth supporting directly at world.openfoodfacts.org.

USDA FoodData Central

FoodData Central, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, is where MacroPair's generic and single-ingredient foods come from — Foundation Foods, SR Legacy and the Branded Food Products database. Works of the U.S. government are not subject to copyright, so this data is in the public domain and no licence obliges us to credit it.

We credit it anyway. It is the most carefully measured nutrition data in the world, it is paid for by taxpayers, and taking it silently would be poor manners. USDA does not endorse MacroPair and has no involvement in it; we do not use the USDA name or seal on anything that implies otherwise.

What MacroPair adds on top

The catalog you search in the app is not a straight copy of either source. On top of them we build our own layer, and that layer is our work:

• Deduplication and ranking across the two sources, so one barcode gives one answer.
• Freshness arbitration — when a record is years old and the live source disagrees materially, we go and check rather than trusting the older, more official-looking row.
• Plausibility checks on serving sizes and macro totals, which flag foods whose printed numbers cannot be right.
• Foods you photograph or enter yourself, which stay in your household's catalog and always outrank both public sources for you.

None of that changes where the underlying records came from, which is why this page exists.

If you want to reuse this data

The ODbL is a share-alike licence, and share-alike travels with the data. The Open-Food-Facts-derived records in MacroPair's catalog are still ODbL data; our Terms of Use do not restrict your rights in them, and could not. What our Terms protect is our own software, our brand, our corrections and analysis, and — above all — our users' private diary data, which is nobody's open data and never will be.

If you want Open Food Facts data, take it from the source: Open Food Facts publishes the complete database for free, in bulk, at world.openfoodfacts.org/data. It is fresher there than in any copy of ours. If you have a question about the OFF-derived records specifically as they appear in MacroPair, write to support@macropair.com and we will answer it.

Found a food that is wrong?

Report it from the food's page in the app, or email support@macropair.com with the barcode. Public food data drifts — recipes get reformulated, labels get reprinted — and reports are the fastest way we find out. Where a correction belongs upstream, the right place for it is Open Food Facts itself, where every app that uses the data gets the benefit.

Questions

HarbingerScope LLC (WhiteBoxForge) · Richmond, Texas, USA
support@macropair.com