spoonacular
Spoonacular (skycraft GmbH) operates a food ontology and Recipe API covering 2,600+ ingredients, 5,000+ recipes, and 600K+ products, serving 253,000+ developers and consumers with a free meal-planner app.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2013
- HeadquartersMichigan City, United States
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B and B2C
- OfferingSoftware
What spoonacular does
Spoonacular, operated by skycraft GmbH (Dr. David Urbansky, CEO; headquartered in Dresden, Germany), operates a food technology platform built around a proprietary food ontology and a developer-facing Food/Recipe API, supported by a free consumer meal-planning app. The platform's core differentiator is a hand-curated knowledge graph that encodes relationships between ingredients, recipes, nutrition, allergens, and dietary requirements—including non-obvious inferences such as automatic detection that Worcestershire sauce disqualifies a recipe from being vegetarian or that nut-free muffins cannot contain pecans. The ontology currently covers 2,600+ ingredients, 5,000+ analyzed recipes, 600K+ grocery products, and 115K+ menu items from 800+ American restaurant chains, with semantic search enabled by natural language understanding that supports complex queries (e.g., 'gluten free nut free dessert without apples'). The system claims 99.999% API uptime and is reported to be used by 253,000+ developers.
spoonacular firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- spoonacular
- Legal name
- skycraft GmbH
- Website
- https://spoonacular.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2013
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Short description
- Spoonacular (skycraft GmbH) operates a food ontology and Recipe API covering 2,600+ ingredients, 5,000+ recipes, and 600K+ products, serving 253,000+ developers and consumers with a free meal-planner app.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
spoonacular industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Food and Recipe API
- NAICS
- Special Food Services (7223)
- SIC
- Food And Kindred Products (2000)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Local Chef/Restaurant Meal Boxes & Marketplace Prepared Meals (CRAHAJAI)
Keywords
Where spoonacular is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Michigan City
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
spoonacular business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B and B2C
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- API Subscription Plans: Tiered subscription model for API access with Starter ($9/mo), Cook ($29/mo), Culinarian ($79/mo), and Chef ($149/mo) plans. Additional usage billed per point above daily limits.
- Usage-based Overage: After daily point limits are exceeded, additional requests are billed at per-point rates ($0.007 down to $0.002 depending on tier).
- Consumer App (Freemium): Free meal planner, food tracker, and recipe saver with free core features. Premium features likely available for power users.
- Academic/Hackathon Access: $10/month academic or hackathon plan providing up to 5,000 requests/day for students and hackathon participants.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Monthly | Starter: $9/mo - 200 points/day, $0.007/point overage, 1,000 max points/day, 2 req/s, 3 concurrent requests, forum support |
| Subscription | Monthly | Cook: $29/mo - 1,500 points/day, $0.005/point overage, 5 req/s, 5 concurrent, email support, no backlink, 99% uptime SLA |
| Subscription | Monthly | Culinarian: $79/mo - 4,500 points/day, $0.004/point overage, 10 req/s, 10 concurrent |
| Subscription | Monthly | Chef: $149/mo - 10,000 points/day, $0.002/point overage, 20 req/s, phone support, exclusive previews, 99.9% uptime SLA |
| Subscription | Monthly | Academic/Hackathon: $10/mo - up to 5,000 requests/day |
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels10 records
Marketing channels7 records
spoonacular product offering
Product offeringCore offering
spoonacular operates a developer-facing Food/Recipe API built on a proprietary food ontology covering 2,600+ ingredients, 5,000+ recipes, 600K+ grocery products, and 115K+ restaurant menu items, with semantic search, nutritional analysis, and meal-planning endpoints sold via tiered subscriptions. Alongside the API, it offers a free consumer Meal Planner app, browser-based recipe savers, a Food Chatbot across web/Telegram/Skype/Alexa, and a Recipe Toolkit of widgets (including a WordPress plugin) used by food bloggers.
Product overview
Spoonacular offers a unified food technology platform centered on its Food API and free consumer-facing meal planning app. The core product is the Food API, a recipe and nutrition API with a complex food ontology, supported by a free Meal Planner app with shopping list generation and nutritional tracking. The Recipe Toolkit provides free widgets (Ingredient Visualizer, Price Estimator, Nutrition Visualizer, Recipe Cardmaker) for food bloggers, available as standalone tools or a WordPress plugin. Additional offerings include a Food Chatbot accessible via web, Telegram, Skype, and Amazon Alexa; browser extensions for Chrome/Firefox/Safari to save recipes from any website; and educational content through the Spoonacular Academy and Food Articles.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Spoonacular Food API / Recipe API A REST API sold on tiered monthly subscriptions (Starter $9/mo to Chef $149/mo) plus usage-based overage, providing developers with semantic recipe search, automated nutritional analysis, allergen and dietary inference, meal planning, shopping list generation, UPC lookup, food NER, and chatbot building, with an academic/hackathon plan at $10/month and an MCP server for AI integration.
- Free Meal Planner A free web and mobile meal planning application targeted at health-conscious individual consumers, allowing them to search recipes and grocery products, build weekly meal plans, track nutrition and cost, generate shopping lists, sync with calendars, and access community meal plans.
- Spoonacular Recipe Toolkit A free suite of embeddable widgets for food bloggers and recipe websites, including an Ingredient Visualizer with 1,500+ ingredient images, a Price Estimator with cost-per-serving breakdown, a Nutrition Visualizer for nutritional charts, a Recipe Cardmaker for shareable recipe cards, and a Recipe by Ingredients Finder, available as standalone tools or through the WordPress plugin.
- Food Chatbot (Spoon Chat) A web-based conversational chatbot for food queries, with parallel deployment on Telegram (@spoonacularBot), Skype, and Amazon Alexa/Echo, enabling recipe search, grocery product lookup, and restaurant menu item queries through chat or voice.
- Recipe Saver and Browser Extensions A bookmarklet and a set of browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that let individual users save recipes from any website directly into their spoonacular account for later meal planning and organization.
- Spoonacular WordPress Recipe Plugin A WordPress plugin distributed via wordpress.org that embeds spoonacular's Ingredient Visualizer, Price Estimator, and Nutrition Visualizer widgets into food blog posts, part of the broader Recipe Toolkit.
- Spoonacular MCP Server for AI Integration An MCP server launched in 2024 that lets AI tools and agents access spoonacular's food and recipe data over the Model Context Protocol, enabling AI-powered food, nutrition, and recipe applications.
Quantifiable outcome
- 253,000+ developers using the platform
- +2 more outcomes
Companies that use spoonacular
Customer profileNamed customers9 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles5 records
spoonacular technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration10 records
AI capability7 records
Feature8 records
spoonacular partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Three partnerships are on record, tiered core.
- NutriAdmincoreNutriAdmin integrates spoonacular's database for their Recipes feature, allowing nutritionists and dietitians to easily search, create, and use recipes for meal planning. The integration enables comprehensive meal plan creation leveraging spoonacular's recipe database.
- RapidAPIcoreAPI distributed through RapidAPI marketplace, which handles subscription management, billing, and provides an additional discovery channel for developers.
- StripecorePayment processing partner handling all API subscription billing. Stripe processes payments according to their Privacy Policy.
Scale indicators10 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights5 records
spoonacular competitors and assessment
Company assessmentBroad incumbents
- MyFitnessPal: MyFitnessPal owns a large nutrition database, food tracking, and meal-level calorie/macro analysis. Overlaps with spoonacular's nutritional analysis and dietary detection but is a consumer app rather than an API.
- Yummly: Yummly (acquired by Whirlpool) operates a large-scale recipe search, meal planning, and grocery-shopping platform with consumer and smart-kitchen applications. Comparable on meal planning and recipe taxonomy, though it is a consumer-facing platform rather than an API-first product.
- Allrecipes: Allrecipes is one of the largest recipe discovery platforms, with ratings, dietary filters, and ingredient search. Comparable on recipe content and SEO-driven recipe discovery, but it is a publisher rather than an API.
Emerging players
- Mealime: Mealime is a meal-planning app with curated recipes, dietary filters, and grocery delivery integrations. Comparable on the consumer meal-planning UX side, though it does not expose a developer API.
Direct peers
- BigOven: BigOven offers recipe management, meal planning, and grocery list tools with a community-driven recipe database. It overlaps with spoonacular's consumer meal planner, recipe saver, and shopping-list generation, and historically offered an API for partners.
- Whisk (Samsung Food): Whisk (now Samsung Food) provides meal planning, recipe organization, and a shopping-list engine with developer/API offerings used by publishers and grocers. Comparable to spoonacular on recipe-data infrastructure for third parties, with a stronger enterprise publisher footprint.
- Edamam: Edamam provides a food and nutrition API (recipes, ingredients, allergen/diet labeling, nutritional analysis) sold to developers and enterprises. It directly competes with spoonacular's Food API on ontology depth, dietary classification, and developer-first GTM.
- Nutritionalix: Nutritionalix sells branded nutrition and allergen data (including restaurant menu data) to food-service, grocery, and health apps. It directly competes with spoonacular on UPC/ingredient/menu-item data licensing to enterprises.
Others
- USDA FoodData Central: USDA FoodData Central is the canonical public source of ingredient-level nutrition data. It is an upstream dataset rather than a competitor, but it sets a baseline against which any paid food ontology (including spoonacular's) is judged and could be combined with LLMs to compete.
- USDA MyPlate / Open Food Facts: Open Food Facts is an open, crowdsourced product database that competes in the same ingredient/grocery space as spoonacular's 600K+ product set. Relevant as an open-source substitute that pressures API pricing for ingredient/product data.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat4 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
spoonacular social profiles
Digital presencespoonacular compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance1 record
spoonacular financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
spoonacular leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles1 record
spoonacular funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
spoonacular M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about spoonacular
What does spoonacular do?
spoonacular operates a developer-facing Food/Recipe API built on a proprietary food ontology covering 2,600+ ingredients, 5,000+ recipes, 600K+ grocery products, and 115K+ restaurant menu items, with semantic search, nutritional analysis, and meal-planning endpoints sold via tiered subscriptions. Alongside the API, it offers a free consumer Meal Planner app, browser-based recipe savers, a Food Chatbot across web/Telegram/Skype/Alexa, and a Recipe Toolkit of widgets (including a WordPress plugin) used by food bloggers.
Is spoonacular a public or private company?
spoonacular is a private company. It is classified as founder individual operated bootstrapped and is currently operating.
When was spoonacular founded?
spoonacular was founded in 2013. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is spoonacular based?
spoonacular is headquartered in Michigan City, United States, in the North America region.
How does spoonacular make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. API Subscription Plans are the primary driver. The others are usage-based Overage, consumer App (Freemium) and academic/Hackathon Access.
Who are spoonacular's main competitors?
Broad incumbents on record are MyFitnessPal, Yummly and Allrecipes. Mealime is listed as an emerging player. Direct peers are BigOven, Whisk (Samsung Food), Edamam and Nutritionalix. Others are USDA FoodData Central and USDA MyPlate / Open Food Facts.
Does spoonacular have an API?
Yes. Spoonacular provides a Food API and Recipe API that offers access to a comprehensive food ontology with data on 2,600+ ingredients (nutrition, price, health info, substitutions, conversions), 5,000+ recipes (nutrition analysis, cost breakdown, wine pairings, shoppable content), 600K+ grocery products, and 115K+ menu items from 800+ American restaurant chains. The API enables semantic recipe search, recipe extraction from websites, meal planning, shopping list generation, UPC lookup, food detection in text (NER), and chatbot building. Available via RapidAPI marketplace with academic/hackathon plan at $10/month (5,000 requests/day). Free tier available. Joined by 253,000+ developers. SDK available at /food-api/sdk. Developer documentation is at spoonacular.com/food-api/docs.
What industry is spoonacular in?
spoonacular's product category is Food and Recipe API. Its primary akta.pro industry code is CRAHAJAI, Local Chef/Restaurant Meal Boxes & Marketplace Prepared Meals. Its NAICS code is 7223 and its SIC code is 2000.