Where can I find a web service for fast food nutrition information?

Question

Does anyone know where I can find a web service (or even an XML file or spreadsheet I can download) that will let me pull in nutrition information from the major fast food chains (U.S.-based only)?

Answer 1

FatSecret provides food & nutrition info of popular products from restaurants & food chains & they also have an API

Answer 2

Your question piqued my curiosity so I did some digging around. It seemed to me that the FDA ought to have a database with this type of info, and with the whole e-government & open government movement that's starting to catch on in the U.S. finally, it ought to be available on the web and searchable by the public.

Well, it turns out that something like this does exist: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

Just type in the name of any major restaurant chain, and it'll give you a list of all the menu items they have stored in their database. But a word of warning: the search seems to have a problem with certain punctuation marks. For example, WENDY'S is stored in their database. However, if you search for WENDY'S it won't return any results. Same with if you search for WENDYS. Instead, you need to search for WENDY. Capitalization doesn't seem to matter though.

I found the link to this search on the Nutrition.gov website. So maybe there's a downloadable spreadsheet, web service, or other useful resources there for you.