Food.com Recipes Scraper

Food.com Recipes Scraper

Scrape Food.com recipes by keyword, up to a million per run. Every recipe comes with its ingredients, instructions, nutrition facts, prep time, and rating. No login or API key. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Food.com hosts over half a million home-cook recipes, but there is no public API to pull them in bulk. This Actor searches the site by keyword, applies your prep-time and sort-order filters, and returns each matching recipe in one consistent row. It handles pagination and rate limits so you get clean, structured data fast.

Who uses it	What they scrape Food.com for
Food bloggers	Finding trending recipes and ingredient combinations for content inspiration.
Meal-planning app builders	Populating a database with structured recipe data for search and filtering.
Nutrition researchers	Analyzing ingredient patterns and nutritional profiles across a large recipe corpus.
Grocery delivery services	Sourcing recipe ideas to pair with weekly ingredient boxes.

What it does

This Actor collects Food.com recipes by keyword search and returns each one as a flat row with ingredients, instructions, nutrition, and metadata.

• 🔍 Keyword search: enter any term like 'pasta', 'chicken soup', or 'vegan tacos' to find matching recipes.
• ⏱️ Prep-time filter: set a maximum prep time in minutes to keep only quick recipes.
• 📊 Sort control: order results by relevance, highest rating, or newest first.
• 📦 Bulk export: collect up to 1,000,000 recipes in a single run and download as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

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

What you can do with Food.com data

🍝 Build a recipe search engine.

A developer runs the Actor on hundreds of keywords to seed a searchable database of Food.com recipes with consistent ingredient and instruction fields.

📈 Track food trends.

A market researcher scrapes weekly for 'air fryer' or 'overnight oats' to measure how recipe counts and ratings shift over time.

🥗 Plan weekly meals.

A meal-kit company filters recipes by a 30-minute max prep time and highest rating to select dishes for next month's menu.

🧪 Analyze nutritional patterns.

A nutrition student collects thousands of 'soup' recipes to compare sodium and calorie distributions across different cuisine keywords.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No API key needed	Start scraping immediately without registering an app or managing OAuth tokens.
Fixed schema	Every recipe lands in your dataset with the same fields, ready for analysis or import.
Handles scale	Paginates through thousands of results automatically so you do not write a crawler.
Flexible output	Download as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML to fit your existing workflow.

How it compares

This Actor focuses on keyword search with prep-time filtering, while other Food.com scrapers offer URL-based or multi-site approaches.

Feature	ParseForge	Recipe Data Scraper - Extract from 500+ Cooking Websites	Food.com Recipe Scraper	Recipe Scraper - 7 Food Sites
Keyword search	Yes	Yes	Not listed	Yes
Max prep time filter	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Sort by rating or newest	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed
Scrapes only Food.com	Yes	No (500+ sites)	Yes	No (7 sites)
Full ingredient list	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Nutrition facts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Configure the run

Drive the Actor with a search query, and optionally narrow results by maximum prep time and sort order before they reach your dataset. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

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

A larger pull:

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

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 Food.com Recipes 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 Food.com 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/food-com-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 searchQuery is spelled correctly and is not too narrow. Try a broader term like 'chicken' instead of 'Moroccan spatchcock chicken with preserved lemon'. Also confirm that maxPrepTime is not set so low that it excludes all recipes.

The run stopped before reaching my maxItems limit.

Food.com may have fewer total results for your query than your maxItems value. Try a more general search term or remove the maxPrepTime filter to broaden the result set.

Some recipes are missing nutrition facts.

This is expected. Food.com does not guarantee nutrition data on every recipe. The Actor extracts whatever is present on the page and leaves the field empty when it is absent.

The Actor is running slowly.

The Actor respects polite delays to avoid overwhelming the site. If you need faster throughput, consider running multiple instances with different search queries in parallel.

I got blocked or received errors.

The Actor includes automatic retries and rate-limit handling. If errors persist, try reducing maxItems or adding a longer delay between runs. Contact support if the issue continues.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Can I scrape recipes from a specific Food.com URL instead of a search?	This Actor is built for keyword search. To scrape specific recipe URLs, use the search query that appears in that recipe's title or a unique ingredient, then filter the output by URL after the run.
How many recipes can I get in one run?	You can set maxItems up to 1,000,000. The actual number depends on how many results Food.com returns for your search query.
Does this Actor extract the full ingredient list and instructions?	Yes. Each row includes the complete ingredient list, step-by-step instructions, and nutritional facts as they appear on the recipe page.
Can I filter by rating or cook time?	You can sort by highest rating and set a maximum prep time in minutes. The Actor applies these filters during the search so only matching recipes are collected.
What does the 'PERFORMANCE' sort option do?	It uses Food.com's default relevance ranking, which balances popularity and keyword match to surface the most useful recipes first.
Do I need a Food.com account or API key?	No. The Actor reads the public website directly. No login, no API registration, and no OAuth flow is required.
What export formats are supported?	You can export your dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML from the Apify platform after the run finishes.
Can I schedule this Actor to run weekly?	Yes. Apify supports scheduled runs. You can set it to scrape daily or weekly to track new recipes and changing ratings.
Does it handle pagination automatically?	Yes. The Actor follows search result pages until it reaches your maxItems limit or the site runs out of results.
Is the nutritional data always present?	Nutrition facts are extracted when Food.com provides them on the recipe page. Some older or user-submitted recipes may lack full nutrition details.

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 Food.com. 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.