Data sources & licensing

Updated: 2026-08-27

TL;DR. Every food in Macroline shows the source it came from. Some of that data comes from Open Food Facts, which is licensed under the ODbL — a share-alike licence. So we publish our Open Food Facts–derived data right back: download it here. Nothing else in Macroline is covered by that licence, and none of it is your data.

Where the numbers come from

Source	What it covers	Licence
USDA FoodData Central	Generic foods, household portions, survey dishes, and branded packaged products.	Public domain (US Government work)
Open Food Facts	Barcoded packaged products, especially newer and international ones.	ODbL 1.0 — share-alike
Restaurant & manufacturer nutrition pages	Chain menu items, transcribed from each brand's own published nutrition information, with a link to the page we read.	Facts; attributed to the brand
Macroline	Dishes we compute from component foods, corrections we make, and our curation.	Ours

In the app, every food row carries a badge naming its source, and tapping through takes you to where the numbers came from. That's deliberate: a calorie count you can't trace is a guess wearing a uniform.

Open Food Facts and the ODbL

When you scan a barcode we don't have, we ask Open Food Facts, and we keep the answer so the next person who scans it gets an instant result. That collection of kept answers is, in ODbL terms, a derivative database, and we use it publicly. The licence's share-alike term says we must offer that database back under the same licence. We do:

Download our Open Food Facts data (CSV, ODbL 1.0)

The file contains every row in our food database that came from Open Food Facts, and it is generated live, so it is never stale. It is offered under the Open Database License v1.0. Attribution belongs to Open Food Facts and its contributors — thousands of volunteers who photographed and typed in labels so the rest of us don't have to. A machine-readable index of what we publish lives at api.macroline.app/data.

We don't republish Open Food Facts product photographs — those are contributed under CC BY-SA, and we simply don't store them. If we ever correct a product that came from Open Food Facts, that correction stays inside the Open Food Facts–derived database above and is published in the download along with everything else, because a fix to their record belongs to that shared database too.

What the ODbL does not cover

The share-alike term applies to the Open Food Facts–derived database above, and only to that. It does not extend to:

Your data. Your diary, weight, medications, body log and account are yours. They are never published, never sold, and never part of any dataset we release. See the Privacy Policy.
USDA data, which is US Government public domain.
Restaurant and manufacturer nutrition transcribed from each brand's own published information.
Our own work — computed dishes, corrections, curation, rankings, and the Macroline software itself.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong, tell us at info@macroline.app and include the barcode or food name. If the row came from Open Food Facts, the best fix helps everyone: you can also correct it directly at openfoodfacts.org, and it will flow back to us.