Credits — Data Sources
Effective date : 2026-06-18 Version : 0.4.0
KCalories relies on several public nutritional databases to power the food information surfaced inside the app. This page lists the sources used and their reuse terms, in compliance with the applicable open data licences.
1. Ciqual 2025 — French Food Composition Table (ANSES)
- Source : French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) — Food Observatory
- Reference : Ciqual 2025 nutritional food composition table, version 2025-11-03
- DOI : 10.57745/RDMHWY
- Public URL : https://ciqual.anses.fr/
- Licence : Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab 2.0)
- Coverage : ~3,500 generic French foods, full macro- and micronutrient profiles
- Use in KCalories : the reference dataset for French-language food search
Required attribution (Etalab 2.0) : “Source: Ciqual 2025 Nutritional Composition Table, ANSES, https://ciqual.anses.fr/, Etalab Open Licence v2.0.”
2. USDA — FoodData Central & Pesticide Data Program
- Source : United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) — Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center
- Public URL : https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
- Licence : Public domain (U.S. Government work, no copyright applies)
- Data used in KCalories :
- SR Legacy (National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Legacy Release — April 2018) : a frozen dataset of generic English-language foods. The SR Legacy dataset holds ≈ 7,800 foods; a subset, deduplicated against CIQUAL, is integrated into name search as an English-language complement to the Ciqual entries.
- FoodData Central — Branded Foods : queried live via the FDC API during a barcode scan, when a product is absent from Open Food Facts. No Branded data is stored — the lookup is made on the fly and the result cached temporarily.
- Pesticide Data Program (PDP) (ams.usda.gov/datasets/pdp) : the official US pesticide-residue monitoring program. KCalories aggregates the raw PDP data (2024 report + multi-year consensus) into a per-commodity residue-load indicator, used to modulate how relevant “organic” is per commodity (small organic/non-organic gap when measured residues are low). Public-domain data processed offline and bundled statically (no runtime call, no user data transmitted).
Required notice (USDA) : “Mention of trade names, commercial products, or companies does not imply recommendation nor endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
Although no attribution is mandated, KCalories cites the source as a matter of scientific courtesy.
3. Open Food Facts
- Source : Open Food Facts — a collaborative open database of food products
- Public URL : https://world.openfoodfacts.org/
- Licences :
- Data : Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0
- Individual records : Database Contents License (DbCL)
- Product photos : Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA)
- Coverage : over 3 million products scanned worldwide, updated daily by the community
- Use in KCalories : live search and barcode lookups for packaged products
Required attribution (ODbL) : “Contains information from Open Food Facts (https://world.openfoodfacts.org/), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Modifications applied : aggregation, formatting, normalisation.”
4. Food images — Wikimedia Commons & Openverse
- Sources : Wikimedia Commons and Openverse (which aggregates Flickr, museums and other Creative Commons providers)
- Licences : only images under reuse-and-modify-friendly licences are published — CC0, Public Domain Mark, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA). No-Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) and Non-Commercial (NC) works are excluded, because the app resizes images. Each published image records its own specific licence + attribution (author, licence, source page).
- Coverage : illustrative photos for generic foods (the “overlay” food entries).
- Modifications applied : the original photo is resized into responsive renditions (thumbnail / card / original) and re-encoded to WebP. No other alteration is made.
Required attribution (CC-BY / CC-BY-SA) : for every published image the author, licence and source page are recorded at publication (e.g. “Photo: [author], [licence], via Wikimedia Commons / Openverse, [source URL]”). This page credits the source banks in aggregate; per-image captions are planned for a later version.
5. KCalories commitments
- KCalories does not modify the raw nutritional values pulled from the three nutritional sources above (Ciqual, USDA, Open Food Facts). The only transformations applied are unit conversions (e.g. sodium mg → g) and format normalisations (food category mapping, indexing for search).
- Where a value is missing in the source, KCalories displays it as “not available” rather than imputing it arbitrarily.
- User-added custom foods (home recipes, custom dishes) remain the exclusive property of the user and are never redistributed.
- Aggregated, anonymised statistics (e.g. food popularity within the app) may be used to refine search ranking, in strict compliance with the Privacy Policy.
6. Data refresh
| Source | Refresh cadence | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Ciqual | Annual (each autumn, when ANSES publishes a new version) | Manual — KCalories team |
| USDA SR Legacy (name search) | No refresh planned (dataset frozen in 2018) | — |
| USDA FoodData Central — Branded (barcode scan) | Real-time via API (live) | Automatic |
| Open Food Facts | Real-time via API (live) | Automatic |
| Food images (Wikimedia Commons / Openverse) | On demand, human-reviewed before publication | Manual — KCalories team |
The exact dataset version used by the app is shown on this screen. When a major refresh ships (e.g. migration from USDA SR Legacy to USDA Foundation Foods), a new version of this document will be published and surfaced to you via the app’s standard update flow.
7. Contact
For any question regarding the origin of the data or licence compliance:
- Email : contact@kcaloriesapp.com
- Postal address : see Legal Notice
Last updated: 2026-06-09
Last updated : June 18, 2026