mcp-server-fooddata-dk

MCP server for Danish food and nutrition data. Combines Open Food Facts (Danish branded/supermarket products, barcode lookup) with the DTU Frida food composition database (generic Danish foods like rugbrød, leverpostej, frikadeller).

Read-only, no user accounts, no credentials. Built as a companion to mcp-server-fatsecret: FatSecret's free tier only carries US food data, so this server supplies the real Danish numbers and the calling model logs the meal there with the serving scaled to match.

This is an independent, unofficial project, not affiliated with Open Food Facts or DTU.

Why two sources

They cover opposite gaps, and neither is sufficient alone:

Source	Strong at	Weak at
Open Food Facts	Branded supermarket products, barcode scanning, ~9,400 Danish-tagged items	Generic/home-cooked foods; barcode coverage is patchy
DTU Frida	Generic and composite Danish foods, authoritative composition data	No branded products, no barcodes

fooddata_search queries both and returns Frida first, since for a generic Danish food DTU's figures are authoritative while OFF's nearest equivalent is a branded approximation.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
fooddata_search_capabilities	Discovery — find the right tool
fooddata_search	Keyword search across both sources; per-100g macros with source attribution
fooddata_get_by_barcode	Open Food Facts barcode (EAN) lookup
fooddata_get_food	Full detail for one food by id (off:<barcode> or frida:<id>)
fooddata_sources	Which sources are available and their required attribution

All values are per 100 g/ml — the only basis both sources reliably share. The caller scales from there.

Setup

No credentials needed. Open Food Facts requires only a descriptive User-Agent, which defaults to this project's name and URL; set OFF_USER_AGENT to include a real contact address if you run it at any volume.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fooddata-dk": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-server-fooddata-dk"],
      "env": { "OFF_USER_AGENT": "yourapp/1.0 (you@example.com)" }
    }
  }
}

Adding the Frida dataset (optional)

Frida has no public API — its site is a single-page app over an undocumented backend, which this project deliberately does not reverse-engineer. The dataset is instead downloaded by hand and converted:

npm run frida:convert -- frida-export.csv ./data/frida.json --version 5.5

See data/README.md. The server runs fine without it, serving Open Food Facts only and reporting Frida as unavailable.

Rate limits and caching

Open Food Facts allows 15 requests/min for product reads and 10/min for searches, per IP. Responses are cached in memory (1 h TTL, 500 entries), including barcode misses — a barcode absent from OFF won't appear a minute later. A 429 is reported as a clear rate-limit message rather than a bare status code, and OFF's habit of serving an HTML error page during outages is detected and reported as such.

Attribution

Both licences require credit, and the server attaches it to every result:

• Open Food Facts — Open Database License (ODbL).
• DTU Frida — Frida Food Data (https://frida.fooddata.dk), National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark.

Optional HTTP server

npm run dev:http (and the published Docker image) serve /mcp over Streamable HTTP, gated by MCP_HTTP_TOKEN, plus a /healthz endpoint reporting whether the Frida dataset loaded. There is no per-user state, so unlike the personal connectors this one needs no identity forwarding.

Verification

npm run typecheck && npm test && npm run build
npm run smoke:live   # hits the real Open Food Facts API

License

Apache-2.0