A lot of nutrition apps are logging tools first — they let anyone type in a food and accept whatever calorie count comes back. FuelU is built the other way around: every calorie and macro figure you see traces back to a specific, sourced, and verified food record.
| One canonical record per food | Every food resolves to a single, structured ingredient record. When multiple sources describe the same food, we reconcile them instead of showing whichever one loaded first. |
| Manually verified, not just imported | Raw database exports are messy — inconsistent units, missing micronutrients, mislabeled serving sizes. Our ingredient pipeline flags and corrects these issues by hand before a food is trusted for calculations. |
| Trusted sources first, always | USDA and government-published databases are prioritised over user-submitted or scanned data whenever both exist for the same food. |
| Transparent about what we don't do | We don't run our own food lab. We combine multiple respected public food-composition databases with structured, hand-checked ingredient data — sourcing you can trace back, source by source, below. |
FuelU relies on the following open, publicly-published nutrition databases. We gratefully acknowledge each source and its licence.
Comprehensive food nutrient database maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the gold-standard reference used by dietitians and researchers.
Open, collaboratively-verified database of packaged food products from around the world, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL).
Lab-verified composition data for 2,857 New Zealand foods (87 nutrient components) from the FOODfiles™ 2024 dataset. © Plant & Food Research / Ministry of Health (Crown), 2024.
Australian food nutrient database published by Food Standards Australia New Zealand under Creative Commons licensing.