MyFitnessPal Scales Nutritional Information With the Nutritionix Nutrition Database

MyFitnessPal is the #1 global nutrition and food tracking app that helps people around the world reach their health goals through better food choices by providing knowledge, motivation, and a sense of progress. MyFitnessPal offers members one of the world’s most comprehensive nutrition and food tracking platforms, allowing them to track their food, create personalized and goal-driven meal plans, record exercise activity, and log their weight. With one of the largest food databases in the world, comprising over 20 million foods, access to over 2,000 recipes, and over 40 connected fitness partners, MyFitnessPal provides members with the tools for positive, healthy change.

As their nutrition data continued to expand, they realized that maintaining an accurate and trustworthy nutrition database on their own posed some challenges. Since some of MyFitnessPal’s food database is crowdsourced, they sought to verify the information for accuracy, which required extensive amounts of time to keep up with the pace of user submissions.

Additionally, MyFitnessPal wanted to supplement its database with even more foods at scale. To help address this and other priorities, they chose to use the Nutritionix Nutrition Database. Since integrating this data into their platform, they have realized an expanded nutrition dataset that can be used to help build improved customer experiences and improved search relevancy.

Beyond the crowd

MyFitnessPal seeks to provide high-quality nutritional information at scale to all of their customers. Implementing the Nutritionix database helped provide food data accuracy and reliability to instill better confidence in their audience. This additional data not only helps improve the experience for customers logging their meals but also helps enhance the insights they provide. The granularity of this nutrition data has been a major win for them and their customers.

Verification: Nutrition data you can trust

Aiming to provide complete, accurate, and up-to-date nutrition information is an essential component of MyFitnessPal’s offerings. To maintain the integrity of its database, they have their nutrition experts review the accuracy and completeness of information associated with food entries, but the sheer volume of food entries to review proved to be burdensome. To help supplement their efforts, MyFitnessPal turned to the Nutritionix Nutrition Database, which has a rigorous verification process conducted by Registered Dietitians that gives MyFitnessPal the confidence to add these foods to their reviewed food system.

Because we trust the quality of Nutritionix food datasets, we don’t need to dedicate the same internal resources in our reviews, which saves us significant time and effort. This trust has positioned Nutritionix as a valuable element in our food database.

Joshua Klenk

Director of Search & Data Engineering

Food data management made easy

One of the main reasons MyFitnessPal values its partnership with Nutritionix is the ease of use and accessibility of the food data. It’s incredibly simple to integrate and maintain, allowing them to review and validate the information they receive. This foundation has been invaluable for implementing Nutritionix into their user experience.

Another reason is the support and responsiveness of the Nutritionix account team, which is open to feedback and always willing to go the extra mile to solve any issues. For example, when they had some data inconsistencies in imports, the team quickly resolved them and helped identify what the best practices for ingestion should be for long-term reliability.

One particular standout feature for MyFitnessPal has been Nutritionix’s extensive partnerships with restaurants. The depth and reliability of this restaurant data make it easy for the team to trust what they receive. The volume of data and frequent updates from Nutritionix have been crucial in supporting their food database.

Our initial use of the Nutritionix Nutrition Database was to integrate it into our database once or twice a year. After closer review, we noticed that this verified data was solving a lot of problems for us. Now we use it regularly to refresh and expand the variety of foods we offer our customers for deeper dietary insights that power their wellness journey.

Joshua Klenk

Director of Search & Data Engineering

Platform taxonomy support

MyFitnessPal uncovered an additional benefit to implementing the Nutritionix Nutrition Database. They now have a benchmark to direct how to improve some of their internal taxonomy processes. The Nutritionix nutritional content now serves as a standard against which they can evaluate and curate other foods in their database.

Using reliable nutrition data empowers them to provide users with enhanced features. This aligns with their goal of successfully educating users about the impact of nutrition on their health.

Navigating nutrition with confidence

Though MyFitnessPal provides a wide range of features for consumers, their goal is to help users along their ongoing journey—not just in the moment, but as a continuous process.

To this end, the features they develop—whether new or enriched versions of existing ones—are about ensuring that users derive meaningful value from them. The Nutritionix Nutrition Database’s high-quality data is instrumental in supporting MyFitnessPal with features intended to provide more value to their customers in support of their health and wellness goals.

Paving the path to wellness

MyFitnessPal continually focuses on improving the quality and efficiency of their pipelines and processes to ensure their users get the most relevant and accurate information available. The Nutritionix Nutrition Database supports MyFitnessPal as it continues to innovate and improve its features to help consumers achieve their health and wellness goals.