# spoonacular (slim)

> spoonacular is a recipe and food REST API from skycraft GmbH in Dresden. It searches recipes by ingredients, diet and nutrients, analyses recipes and grocery products, builds meal plans and shopping lists, and has a small open-source MCP server.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular.md (~8,050 tokens) · this version ~1,980 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-04 · pricing https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular#pricing · reviews https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular#reviews
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

**D · 49/100 · rank #1048 of 1349 · #2 in Cooking, recipes & meal planning · not agent-ready · confidence medium**


Assessment: A broad recipe, ingredient, product and meal-plan API with a public OpenAPI document, 24 generated SDKs and a free 50-point day with no card. One key per account travels in the query string by default, the status page showed no data to our reader, and the terms allow caching for an hour at most.

## Facts

- Kind: HTTP API · vendor: skycraft GmbH · category: Cooking, recipes & meal planning · legal entity: skycraft GmbH · provenance 83/100
- Local only (stdio): npm `spoonacular-mcp`
- Auth: API key · pricing: Freemium · x402: no · licence: unknown
- Probe metrics: not measured yet (probes haven't run)
- Surface listed: The REST API at api.spoonacular.com, read from spoonacular.com/food-api (docs, pricing, FAQ, updates, terms, privacy, SDK and contact pages), the OpenAPI document in ddsky/spoonacular-api-clients, a shallow clone of ddsky/spoonacular-mcp and the npm registry on 3 November 2026. No account was made and no call was sent
- Endpoints: 97 paths in the OpenAPI document across recipes (search, information, similar, random, extract from a website, analyse, nutrition, taste, price breakdown, widgets), ingredients, grocery products and UPC lookup, menu items from restaurant chains, meal planning and shopping lists for connected users, wine pairing and misc (food trivia, jokes, image classification)
- MCP server: spoonacular-mcp 1.0.0 on npm (4 August 2025), stdio, TypeScript on @modelcontextprotocol/sdk, six read-only tools with JSON Schema inputs and no annotations. The key is read from SPOONACULAR_API_KEY and appended to each request url as apiKey
- Quotas: Points per day by plan (50, 1,500, 4,500, 10,000), 1 point a request plus 0.01 a result with per-endpoint exceptions (0.1 for autocomplete, 3 for PNG widgets, 50 for video extraction), reset at midnight UTC, reported in X-API-Quota-Request, X-API-Quota-Used and X-API-Quota-Left
- Rate limits: HTTP 429 beyond 60 requests a minute on Free, 120 on Starter, 5, 10 and 20 a second on Cook, Culinarian and Chef, with 2, 5, 10 and 20 concurrent requests. No Retry-After or backoff guidance documented
- SLA: 99 per cent uptime on Cook and Culinarian, 99.9 per cent on Chef per the pricing page; the FAQ says SLAs are for plans above $250 a month through sales. No SLA document or credits found
- Data licence: Recipe ids, titles and image urls may be stored indefinitely; other data may be cached for one hour with written permission; reselling, scraping and copying derived data are forbidden; credit and a link to the recipe source are required; all data must be deleted when access ends
- SDKs: Generated clients for 24 languages (Android, Angular, C#, C++, Clojure, Dart, Elixir, Elm, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, TypeScript) in ddsky/spoonacular-api-clients, MIT, last push 2 December 2025
- Also sold through: RapidAPI, where a card is required and the academic and hackathon plan ($10 a month, up to 5,000 requests a day, manual approval within 72 hours) is sold
- Legal entity: skycraft GmbH, Leibnizstraße 5, 01187 Dresden, Germany, CEO Dr. David Urbansky, per the imprint. The terms and privacy policy name only spoonacular
- Prices: Cook plan $29 per month (plan); Culinarian plan $79 per month (plan); Chef plan $149 per month (plan); Overage point on Cook $0.005 per credit; Academic or hackathon plan $10 per month (plan)

- Scores: Reliability 58, Performance pending, Schema & documentation 65, Agent ergonomics 68, Security & auth 20, Payments & pricing 40, Task success pending, Maintenance & community 22, Transparency & trust 61 · total over the 7 assessed categories
- Why: Reliability, Read with the hosted lines. · Schema & documentation, Public OpenAPI 3.0.0 document (info version 2.0.2, 97 paths, 99 operations) in the vendor's spoonacular-api-clients repository, linked from… · Agent ergonomics, `number` caps results on every search (1 to 100), `addRecipeInformation`, `fillIngredients` and `includeNutrition` switch sections on, and t… · Security & auth, One key per account with no scopes, expiry or rotation procedure, documented first as the `apiKey` query parameter and also sent in the quer… · Payments & pricing, No x402, MPP or L402 (0 of 40). · Maintenance & community, Read as a closed service. · Transparency & trust, Closed API with terms last updated 16 April 2026 that are clear on caching, attribution and termination; the MCP server is ISC and the clien…
- Sources: 20, open questions: 7, both in the full twin
- Capabilities: cooking.recipes, cooking.nutrition, cooking.meal-plans, cooking.pantry, cooking.grocery, cooking.food-recognition
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/spoonacular.json
- Verify (for the vendor): the badge `https://www.anchorterminal.com/badges/spoonacular.svg` or a link to https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spoonacular from a page on spoonacular.com or one of its subdomains, or the README at the root of github.com/ddsky/spoonacular-mcp, then `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/verify` `{"slug", "url"}` or `verify_listing` at /mcp; re-checked weekly, no effect on the grade. Snippets in the full twin.
- Support: Discord https://discord.gg/EkYYnVF; https://spoonacular.com/contact; https://spoonacular.com/food-api/faq; more in the full twin

## Before you call it

1. Send the key as the `x-api-key` header rather than `apiKey=` in the URL, and keep `number` small, since every result adds 0.01 points to the call's cost
2. Read `X-API-Quota-Left` on each response; a 402 means the day's points are gone until midnight UTC and a 429 means the plan's requests-per-second limit, with no Retry-After to wait on
3. Use `/recipes/complexSearch` with `addRecipeInformation=true` for one call instead of a search followed by one information call per recipe
4. Do not store ingredients, instructions or nutrition between sessions; the terms allow only recipe ids, titles and image urls to be kept
5. Show the original recipe source and a link to it with every recipe, as the terms require

## Connect

```bash
npm install -g spoonacular-mcp
```

```bash
curl -H "x-api-key: $SPOONACULAR_API_KEY" "https://api.spoonacular.com/recipes/complexSearch?query=pasta&number=5"
```
Full config and headless snippets are in the full page. Through letme (picks today, calling later): https://letme.dev/spoonacular

## Similar tools

| Tool | Grade | Score | Shared capabilities | Slim |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| LogMeal | D | 49.1 | cooking.food-recognition, cooking.nutrition, cooking.meal-plans, cooking.recipes, cooking.grocery | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/logmeal.min.md |
| Eat This Much Partner API | E | 45.7 | cooking.meal-plans, cooking.grocery, cooking.nutrition, cooking.recipes | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/eat-this-much.min.md |
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| fatsecret Platform API | E | 42 | cooking.nutrition, cooking.recipes, cooking.food-recognition, cooking.grocery | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/fatsecret.min.md |
| Nutritionix API | F | 33.6 | cooking.nutrition, cooking.grocery | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nutritionix.min.md |


## Panel reviews (0, desk reviews from public material, no calls made)