Data Sources & Licenses

Palato serves food-composition data from the open datasets below, alongside foods you add yourself and lookups from commercial nutrition APIs (such as Nutritionix, used under their commercial API terms). Each food in the app shows its own source, and foods from Open Food Facts additionally carry a per-product credit and link — that per-product attribution is required by Open Food Facts’ license terms, and this page supplements it rather than replacing it.

Published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal — no attribution is legally required, and we credit it as a courtesy, as USDA requests. Our citation:

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center. FoodData Central. [Internet]. [cited July 27, 2026]. Available from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/.

Data from Open Food Facts — © Open Food Facts contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL).

Three distinct licenses apply to Open Food Facts (per their terms of use): the database is under the ODbL v1.0; the individual contents (nutrient values, ingredient text) are under the Database Contents License (DbCL) v1.0; and product images are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike — a separate license, which is why Palato does not import or rehost Open Food Facts images.

Every Open Food Facts–sourced food in the app links to that product’s page on Open Food Facts (or to openfoodfacts.org when no barcode is known) and mentions the ODbL, as their terms require.

The ODbL is a share-alike license: because we import, clean, and normalize Open Food Facts data, our derived subset of that data — including our transformations — must itself be made available under the ODbL. We publish that export at a stable public URL and refresh it with every re-import (at minimum quarterly).

Status: the export publishes together with our first catalog import of Open Food Facts data, on this project’s public releases page. Until that import ships, the app’s Open Food Facts lookups are served live from Open Food Facts itself (with short-lived caching), so there is no derived database to publish yet. This section will link to the download the moment it exists.

Canadian Nutrient File (CNF), Health Canada — planned. When imported, CNF-sourced foods will carry the required credit: “Source: Canadian Nutrient File (CNF), Health Canada. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.”

McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID), Public Health England — planned. When imported, CoFID-sourced foods will carry the required credit: “© Crown copyright. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.”

Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD / AUSNUT), FSANZ — under legal review and not imported. The FSANZ Data User Licence (based on CC BY-SA 3.0 AU with additional terms) requires specific notices and share-alike conditions that our counsel must sign off before any import; none of its required notices apply to the app today because none of its data is in the app.

FAO / INFOODS food-composition databases are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO — a NonCommercial license — so we do not import them into Palato unless FAO grants written permission.

If you spot a missing or incorrect credit, use the in-app “Report a problem” action on the food, or the contact route in our Privacy Policy. We keep this page current whenever a source, license version, or import scope changes.