Where does Surplus get its food data?

From three places, your own country’s foods first:

• Surplus’s food library: about 10,500 everyday foods from the UK’s and the US’s official food tables, kept on your phone so it works without an internet connection. Your own country’s table comes first: McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods (CoFID 2021) in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and USDA FoodData Central in the US and Canada. It knows both countries’ names for a food, so “zucchini” finds courgette.
• Open Food Facts, a free, open database of packaged foods from around the world, used for search and barcode scanning. Search asks it for your country’s products. When it finds only a few, it also asks for other countries’ products, and those go in the “From other countries” group. Its search gives no serving sizes, so its rows show 100 g. Scan the barcode to get the pack’s serving.
• Your recipes, worked out from their ingredients

Meal scan uses Anthropic’s AI to recognise the food in a photo and estimate how much there is. It never gives calories: those come from the food library above.

A food’s page tells you where its figures came from, for example “Figures from Open Food Facts.” Volunteers fill in Open Food Facts, so a product’s figures can now and then be wrong or missing. Check the label if something looks off.

The UK figures contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The US figures are from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central.