Where the numbers come from
Last updated: 13 October 2026Every calorie and macro in Peas & Pans traces back to one food record you can see. This page says which data we use, how a recipe line becomes a number, what gets flagged for you, and what is shown.The source
Every calorie and macro in Peas & Pans traces back to one food record. For most coaches that record is in USDA FoodData Central, the United States Department of Agriculture's public food database. It is in the public domain.We load three of its datasets into our own database and search them ourselves, so an import never depends on a government API being up, and the same recipe gives the same numbers next month.- Foundation Foods, the release of 30 April 2026: laboratory-analysed whole foods, the newest and most precise values.
- SR Legacy, the release of April 2018: the classic Standard Reference set, and the source of nearly every household measure.
- FNDDS, the release of 31 October 2024: foods as eaten, including prepared and composite dishes, with portion weights.
That is 13,000+ foods. We leave out the Branded Foods dataset, about two million manufacturer labels, on purpose: label values are rounded under labelling rules and a label changes without notice.A coach who chooses the UK food table in Settings has each line matched first to McCance and Widdowson's Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID), the 2021 release, 2,856 foods, and to USDA where the UK table has none. Each line shows which table it came from. More on the UK food database page.How a recipe line becomes a number
Each ingredient line is read for its amount, its unit and its food, then matched to the closest food in the database by a text search over the food names and a list of aliases we maintain by hand. The match is shown beside the line, with the grams it resolved to.- A confident match is filled in and marked as such.
- A close call is filled in and flagged for you to check: the line shows the food it chose and asks you to confirm or change it.
- A line with no good match is left for you to pick the food, or to say why the line has none.
"1 cup cooked rice" becomes grams through that food's household measures in the USDA data. Where a food has no measure for the unit you wrote, the line is flagged.The numbers are estimates built on public data and automated matching. You review them before they go to a client; the terms say so, and the flags are there so you know where to look first.What is shown
Calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat and fibre per serving, on recipes and on each day of a meal plan. Foods show sodium and more.Each day of a meal plan also shows 12 nutrients against the FDA Daily Values for adults: sodium, fibre, saturated fat, sugars, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and vitamins A, C and D. Sugars have no daily value and show as a number. When a food in the day has no published value for a nutrient, the total reads "at least". You choose for each meal plan whether the client's page shows them.For the few hundred foods USDA lists without a calorie figure, the calories are calculated from protein, carbohydrate and fat.The library
The starter library holds 600+ recipes, each with every ingredient matched to USDA data and checked. Use one as it is, or save a copy and make it yours. Your own recipes are matched the same way.When the data changes
USDA republishes a dataset about once a year. We load a new release as a reviewed, scheduled step, never automatically, because USDA renames foods between releases and every alias has to be checked again. A plan you built keeps the numbers it was built with.