BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper

BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper

Scrape BBC Good Food recipes by ingredient, diet, cuisine, or difficulty, up to a million per run. Every recipe comes with its full ingredient list, method steps, nutrition data, prep time, and dietary tags. No login or API key. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

BBC Good Food's recipe archive is one of the web's most trusted cooking resources, but manually copying thousands of ingredient lists and method steps is slow and error-prone. This scraper reads the public recipe feeds directly, filtered by your chosen keyword, dietary requirement, cuisine type, or skill level, and returns each match in one consistent, flat schema.\n\nBuild a clean, structured dataset of recipes for meal-planning apps, nutrition analysis, or your next cooking project.

Who uses it	What they scrape BBC Good Food for
Food bloggers and content creators	Gather trending recipes and ingredient combinations for content inspiration.
Nutritionists and dietitians	Analyze nutritional profiles across hundreds of recipes for meal-planning advice.
App developers	Populate a cooking or meal-planning app with structured recipe data.
Home cooks	Build a personal offline collection of recipes matching a specific diet or ingredient.

What it does

This Actor collects BBC Good Food recipes by search query, diet, cuisine, or difficulty, and returns each one as a flat row with ingredients, method, nutrition, and metadata.

• 🔍 Search by keyword: Find recipes by ingredient or dish name, such as 'pasta', 'chicken', or 'chocolate cake'.
• 🥗 Dietary filters: Narrow results to vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, keto, high-protein, and more.
• 🌍 Cuisine type: Filter by cuisine, for example 'italian', 'indian', or 'british'.
• 📊 Skill level: Collect only easy, more effort, or a challenge recipes to match your audience or skill set.
• 📦 Bulk collection: Set a maximum item count up to one million recipes per run for large-scale data projects.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with BBC Good Food data

🥦 Build a diet-specific recipe database.

A nutritionist filters for high-protein, low-carb recipes, scrapes 500 results, and uses the structured nutrition data to create weekly meal plans for clients.

🍝 Research ingredient trends.

A food blogger searches for 'pasta' across Italian cuisine, collects the top 200 recipes, and identifies the most common ingredient pairings for a trend article.

📱 Seed a cooking app with content.

An indie developer scrapes 10,000 easy vegetarian recipes with full methods and nutrition, then imports the flat dataset directly into their meal-planning application.

📊 Analyze nutritional patterns.

A data analyst collects every vegan recipe on BBC Good Food, extracts the nutrition per serving, and calculates average calorie and protein distributions across dish types.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
Full recipe detail	Ingredient quantities, step-by-step method, prep and cook times, serving sizes, and nutrition per serving.
Dietary and skill tags	Every recipe includes its dietary classification and difficulty level as structured fields.
Consistent flat schema	All recipes, regardless of type, arrive in one predictable row format ready for a spreadsheet or database.
No API limits	Reads the public website directly, avoiding OAuth, app registration, and rate-limit headaches.

How it compares

This Actor focuses exclusively on BBC Good Food with deep dietary and cuisine filtering, while the alternatives either cover many sites with less depth per source or scrape the same site with different discovery methods.

Feature	ParseForge	Recipe Data Scraper (500+ sites)	BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper (jungle_synthesizer)	BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper (crawlerbros)
Dietary filter (vegan, keto, high-protein, etc.)	Yes, 14 diet options	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Cuisine type filter	Yes, free-text input	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Difficulty level filter	Yes, three levels	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Full nutrition panel per serving	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not listed
Sitemap-based full catalogue discovery	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Not listed
Multi-site support (500+ cooking websites)	No, BBC Good Food only	Yes	Not listed	Not listed

Configure the run

Drive the Actor from a recipe name or ingredient search, and narrow results by diet, cuisine, and difficulty. Filters run as each recipe is read so only matches reach your dataset. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
  "maxItems": 10,
  "searchQuery": "pasta"
}

A larger pull:

{
  "maxItems": 200,
  "searchQuery": "pasta"
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.021 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$2.10
1,000 results	$21.00
10,000 results	$210.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the BBC Good Food Recipe Scraper.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to BBC Good Food through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/bbcgoodfood-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why am I getting no results?

Check that your search query, diet, cuisine, and difficulty filters are not too restrictive in combination. Try broadening the search by removing one filter at a time. Also verify the spelling of cuisine types, as they must match BBC Good Food's tagging.

The run stopped before reaching my maxItems limit.

The scraper stops when BBC Good Food has no more recipes matching your filters. If you expected more, try a broader search query or remove optional filters like diet and difficulty.

Some recipes are missing nutrition data.

Not every recipe on BBC Good Food includes a full nutrition panel. The scraper extracts whatever is present on the page. Missing values will appear as empty fields in your dataset.

The scraper is running slowly.

Large runs with many thousands of recipes are I/O bound by page fetching. Increase the Actor's memory in the run settings to allow more concurrent requests, or reduce maxItems for a quicker test run.

I see duplicate recipes in my dataset.

BBC Good Food may list the same recipe under multiple categories. Use the recipe URL column in your dataset to deduplicate rows in a spreadsheet or with a simple script after the run completes.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Can I scrape all recipes on BBC Good Food?	You can collect up to one million recipes per run by setting a high maxItems value and leaving the search query empty. The scraper will walk through the recipe catalogue until it hits your limit or runs out of matches.
What recipe data does each row contain?	Each row includes the recipe title, full ingredient list with quantities, step-by-step method, prep and cook times, serving size, nutrition per serving, dietary tags, difficulty level, cuisine, rating, and the source URL.
Can I filter by multiple diets at once?	The diet filter accepts one value per run. To collect recipes across multiple diets, run the Actor once per diet and merge the datasets, or use a broader search and filter afterwards.
How do I search for a specific ingredient?	Enter the ingredient name in the 'Recipe name or ingredient' field. The scraper passes it to BBC Good Food's search and collects every matching recipe up to your maxItems limit.
Does this scraper handle pagination automatically?	Yes. The Actor follows search result pages and recipe links automatically until it reaches your maxItems count or no more results exist.
What export formats are supported?	You can download your dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML directly from the Apify run detail page.
Is a BBC Good Food account or API key required?	No. The scraper reads the publicly available recipe pages, so no login, account, or API key is needed.
Can I scrape recipes by cuisine without a search query?	Yes. Leave the search query empty and fill in the cuisine field with a term like 'italian' or 'indian'. The scraper will collect all recipes tagged with that cuisine.
How long does a large scrape take?	Speed depends on the number of recipes and the Actor's memory allocation. A run of a few hundred recipes finishes in minutes; a million-recipe run will take longer and may benefit from a higher memory plan.
Does the scraper get nutrition information?	Yes. The nutrition panel from each recipe page, including calories, fat, protein, carbs, fibre, and salt per serving, is extracted into structured fields.

Related actors

Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Immediate Media Company Ltd. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.