Dietly Food Data Quality Report 2026

The short version: identifiers and country metadata are abundant, but complete nutrition and serving information are not. That gap is why Dietly separates catalog size from page-ready or search-ready records instead of treating every imported row as equally useful.

Raw catalog quality is not user-facing result quality

This report measures all 4.75 million raw records stored in Dietly's catalog, including incomplete source records retained for long-tail and specific-product coverage. Dietly does not present every record equally.

Search automatically prioritizes the best available candidates using nutritional completeness, plausibility checks, images, serving information, source confidence and relevance. Records with the same normalized name are consolidated so the stronger candidate is normally shown, while curated food lists exclude incomplete or implausible records entirely.

Consequently, the percentages below describe the underlying source catalog, not the typical quality of results users receive. Sparse records are generally available as fallbacks when Dietly has no stronger match for a specific product. When an upstream source improves an existing record, Dietly's refresh process can replace the older version of that same source record.

What 4.75 million records actually contain

The chart below uses the entire production catalog as its denominator. A field counts as present when the normalized Dietly record contains a non-empty value; presence does not prove that the source label is correct.

How to read the 55.3% figure: it should not be interpreted as meaning 44.7% of normal search results are incomplete. Lower-quality catalog records are deprioritized or excluded during result selection.

Barcode99.7%

Country97.7%

Brand69.3%

Image65.8%

Core macros55.3%

Category47.1%

Serving size36.1%

Fiber29.3%

Field or rule	Records	Coverage
Any barcode	4,738,308	99.7%
Well-formed barcode	4,669,075	98.3%
Country metadata	4,644,862	97.7%
Brand	3,292,195	69.3%
Product image	3,124,672	65.8%
All four core nutrition fields	2,629,070	55.3%
Sugar	2,546,586	53.6%
Saturated fat	2,496,562	52.5%
Sodium	2,376,654	50.0%
Category	2,237,134	47.1%
Serving size	1,717,378	36.1%
Fiber	1,391,584	29.3%

The useful catalog is a funnel

Dietly does not treat a name and barcode as sufficient for every use case. Search can retain a broad source-labeled inventory, while public nutrition pages require a smaller minimum set of fields.

4.75Mtotal source-labeled records in the measured catalog

2.63Mrecords with all four core nutrition fields

1.91M1,914,501 records with calories, protein and an image: Dietly's minimum public-page rule

The public-page rule is deliberately easy to explain and reproduce. It is not a claim that all 1.91 million records should be published or indexed. Page selection can still account for nutrient completeness, source confidence, category diversity and whether a record already has a stable public URL.

Completeness and plausibility are different tests

Of the 2,629,070 records with complete core nutrition, 2,622,854—or 99.8%—fall inside Dietly's broad per-100-gram plausibility bounds: 0–900 kcal and 0–100 grams each for protein, fat and carbohydrates. These are guardrails for obvious impossibilities, not laboratory validation.

A second consistency check compares reported calories with the simple 4/4/9 energy estimate from protein, carbohydrates and fat. Using a tolerance of the larger of 50 kcal or 20% of reported calories, 2,525,253 complete records—96.1%—are internally consistent. Fiber, alcohols, rounding and local label rules can create legitimate differences, so this check is a warning signal rather than a verdict.

Important limitation: this report measures coverage and internal consistency. Dietly did not independently laboratory-test the products, and a populated field can still reproduce an incorrect or outdated source label.

What Dietly does with the gap

Keep provenance visible

API results carry a source and confidence value. Dietly's catalog currently combines labeled records from Open Food Facts, USDA FoodData Central and a very small number of Dietly community or assisted entries. Source coverage and field definitions differ, so consumers should not assume every row was produced through the same process.

Rank useful records before sparse ones

Search ranking favors exact names, useful identifiers, complete and plausible core nutrition, images, category information and stronger confidence. Missing nutrients remain missing in the API instead of silently becoming measured zeroes.

Separate discovery from publication

A record can help a barcode or text search without deserving a standalone public page. That separation lets Dietly preserve breadth while applying a higher publication threshold to pages intended for people and search engines.

Methodology

Snapshot

A read-only aggregate query was run against Dietly's production catalog on July 21, 2026. The database contained 4,752,013 records at query time. Percentages use that total unless a different denominator is stated.

Core nutritionCalories, protein, carbohydrates and fat are all present.

Well-formed barcodeContains only digits and is 8–14 characters long. This is a structural check, not a GTIN checksum or ownership check.

Public-page ruleCalories, protein and a non-empty image URL are present. This is the generator's minimum data-selection rule, not an indexability guarantee.

Broad plausibilityComplete core nutrition with 0–900 kcal and 0–100 g each of protein, fat and carbohydrates per 100 g.

Energy consistencyThe reported calories are within the larger of 50 kcal or 20% of the 4/4/9 estimate. The test intentionally allows for rounding and nutrients outside that simple model.

Privacy and reproducibility

The analysis uses counts and percentages only. No record-level database export accompanies this report. Definitions and exact counts are published so the claims can be evaluated without disclosing Dietly's normalized catalog or internal processing pipeline.

Sources and reuse

Open Food Facts database data is reused under the Open Database License; its individual contents use the Database Contents License, and product images have separate licensing terms. USDA FoodData Central data is published in the public domain under CC0. Dietly's measurements, normalization and presentation do not imply that either source endorses Dietly.