Continuous Food Research

MyNetDiary food database is one of the most complete, accurate and up-to-date nutrition data sets in the world. Our food database is a solid foundation for providing high-quality calorie counting and nutrition analysis to MyNetDiary members and visitors.

Here, at 4Technologies, we realize that inaccurate or lacking food database can undermine the whole idea of diet tracking, analyzing and planning. This is why we have established a process for continuous extension, rigorous verification and continuous quality improvement of food and nutrient data.

Quick Facts about MyNetDiary Food Database

  • 133,000 food nutrition labels from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Canada.
  • Up to 36 nutrient values per food.
  • Up to 10 serving sizes per food.
  • Foods are ordered by popularity statistics.
  • Available foods include many well-known brands, restaurants, fast food chains, supermarkets, special diets, ethnic foods, and many other nutrient labels asked by our members.
  • See MyNetDiary Food Dataset Specification for details.

Research Process

If you look under the hood, you may notice that our research and quality assurance teams give a lot of attention to completeness and correctness of the data. Keeping the data up-to-date is challenging since food industry is a dynamic, ever-changing world. Food vendors sell and buy brands, vendors change their name while growing the business or vendors clarify their nutrition labels over time. We meet theese challenges with continuous monitoring and periodic, prioritized research of such vendors and brands.

Avoiding duplication is another important goal of the research process. It is hard to avoid duplication because of re-packaging and re-branding of the same products and their slight variations. We treat duplication as an anomaly and remove it within 24 hours after noticing.

We perform on-demand, customer-driven food research. New food labels become available within 10 business days after one of MyNetDiary customers identifies new vendor or brand. All data anomalies are fixed within 24 hours. When food definitions are not available in MyNetDiary food database, our customers can create and share custom foods.

Finally, we identify new vendors and brands by monitoring food searches and custom foods entered by MyNetDiary customers.

Comparison with Competitors

  • Our food database, similar to other food databases, includes the common USDA nutrient database providing about 7,500 foods. While many stop at this, we went far beyond this - our food database now lists over 133,000 foods!
  • Many databases have obsolete nutrition data. Our oldest data is from Q3 2008, and most of the database is even newer.
  • Some of our competitors rely solely on user community to maintain food database, which inevitably results in low quality, mistakes, and duplication of data. Our community-maintained contributed foods are clearly separated from the high-quality foods maintained by MyNetDiary team.
  • Unlike competitors, we research multiple servings per food whenever possible. Other food diaries list (and count!) different servings as different foods, having for example, dozens of Coca-Cola "foods".
  • We maintain hierarchical food catalog, which makes it convenient to browse big vendors like Wegmans or Tesco. Competitors' catalogs are usually flat, making it difficult to browse and find foods.
  • We are ready to improve the database on demand, which is rarely done by our competitors.

Database Licensing

4Technologies Corp. licenses MyNetDiary food database for non-competitive usage and research purposes. The license does not allow reselling the data or exposing the database for free access via another web site.

You can license the database for the first year with 4 data updates for $25,000. Licensing for the second and subsequent years is $5,000 per annum, which includes 4 data updates as well.

    You can also integrate with our Food Search Web Service providing the following benefits:
  • Quick time-to-market
  • Usage of the latest data, including nutrient research results and popularity index
  • Usage of highly available MyNetDiary infrastructure for performing quick and smart data lookups

Contact Us

Please send your questions and comments to MyNetDiary Customer Support at support@mynetdiary.com.