Food Compare contains more than 170 foods that were manually selected and added to the web project. The USDA has served as our primary source, which provides the world-largest nutrient database.

The application allows the selection of multiple foods that will be displayed in separate data tabs. The data panel comprises several sections that contain separate pieces of informationen, such as the total nutrient composition, energy amount, vitamins, fatty acids and the like.

Additionally, Food Compare allows you to combine different foods to composite food elements. This feature seems useful for people who are interested in the composition of menus consisting of different foods, or who want to determine the total amount of nutrients they consumed within a specific time, like a day.

In order to create a composite food, click the stack button on the food analyze page and add foods to your composite list. Individual portion sizes can be set. Once you have clicked the show button, the composite food will be added to the food data panel as a new tab.

For the juxtaposition of food data between two foods, the direct comparison page allows you to pick two foods and compare the data with each other. This allows you to see and compare the nutrient composition or vitamins of two foods on one glance. Some data pages also allow to synchronize the charts, which means that they are scaled the same way; this may additionally help to quickly compare food data.

Examples for direct comparison:

Food Compare also allows you to rank foods by a certain value, such as a specific vitamin or nutrient. The resulting chart will show those food items of the Food Compare database containing the largest amount of that value in a descending order. Either all foods of the application can be taken into account or just the foods of a specific category. Additionally, users can distinguish between the standardized 100 gram portion sizes or the default portion sizes used in the application.