openfoodfacts-mcp-server

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  <h1>@cyanheads/openfoodfacts-mcp-server</h1>
  <p><b>Look up food products by barcode, search by ingredient or nutrition filter, compare products side-by-side, and browse the canonical tag vocabulary via MCP. STDIO or Streamable HTTP.</b>
  <div>4 Tools</div>
  </p>
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**Public Hosted Server:** [https://openfoodfacts.caseyjhand.com/mcp](https://openfoodfacts.caseyjhand.com/mcp)

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---

## Tools

Four tools for working with [Open Food Facts](https://world.openfoodfacts.org/) — a free, crowd-sourced database of 3M+ packaged food products:

| Tool | Description |
|:-----|:------------|
| `off_get_product` | Fetch a packaged food product by barcode. Returns name, brand, quantity, ingredients, allergens, additives, Nutri-Score, NOVA group, Green-Score, nutrition per 100g/serving, categories, labels, and data completeness. |
| `off_search_products` | Search by text query and/or structured tag filters (category, brand, label, allergen, additive, Nutri-Score grade, NOVA group, country). Returns summary rows with barcodes for follow-up lookups. |
| `off_compare_products` | Side-by-side nutrition and scoring comparison for 2–10 products by barcode. Returns a normalized table of energy, macros, salt, Nutri-Score, NOVA, and Green-Score. |
| `off_browse_taxonomy` | Resolve a human term to the canonical tag ID (categories, labels, allergens, additives, countries, NOVA groups, Nutri-Score grades) that `off_search_products` filters on, against the live Open Food Facts taxonomy. |

### `off_get_product`

Fetch a packaged food product by barcode (EAN-13 or UPC).

- Accepts 8–14 digit barcodes (EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E)
- Returns ingredients (raw text and parsed list with percent estimates, vegan/vegetarian flags), all 14 major allergens as tag IDs, E-number additives, Nutri-Score a–e, NOVA 1–4, Green-Score/Eco-Score, every nutrient Open Food Facts holds per 100g and per serving, the serving size those per-serving figures are measured against, categories/labels/packaging/origins as canonical tag IDs, front image URL, and data completeness score (0–1)
- Optional `fields` parameter restricts the response to a subset (e.g., scores only, or nutrition only)
- Open Food Facts is crowd-sourced — a missing field means "not yet entered by contributors," not that the attribute is absent from the actual product
- A barcode no contributor has recorded raises the `not_found` error carrying a recovery hint — it is never returned as an empty result

---

### `off_search_products`

Search Open Food Facts by text and/or structured tag filters.

- Full-text search across product names, brands, and ingredients
- Structured filters: `categories_tag`, `brands_tag`, `labels_tag`, `allergens_tag`, `additives_tag`, `nutrition_grade` (a–e), `nova_group` (1–4), `countries_tag`
- Text query and tag filters combine — a query with filters returns products that match the text *and* satisfy every filter (e.g., `query: "dark chocolate"` + `labels_tag: en:organic` + `countries_tag: en:france`)
- All filter values are canonical tag IDs — use `off_browse_taxonomy` to resolve human terms (e.g., "organic" → `en:organic`). `brands_tag` takes a brand slug and matches it exactly; open-ended brand wording belongs in `query`
- `additives_tag` filters only on searches with no text query — the text backend does not index additives, so pairing the two is rejected up front rather than returning an empty result set that looks like "no such product"
- Pagination via `page` (1-based) and `page_size` (1–50, default 20)
- `total` is exact on tag-only searches. Text searches stop counting at 10,000 matches, and when that ceiling is hit the response says so with `total_is_lower_bound: true` and renders the count as `10000+` — add filters for an exact figure
- Searches carrying a text query serve only the first 10,000 results — a deeper `page * page_size` is rejected up front with the highest reachable page, not sent and retried. Tag-only searches publish no window, but deep pages are refused unpredictably, so narrowing the filters beats paging far in
- Returns summary rows (barcode, name, brand, Nutri-Score, NOVA, categories) — use `off_get_product` for full label data
- Result counts reflect contributed products, not total products on the market
- Search limited to ~10 requests/min by this server's own client-side budget, kept well inside what Open Food Facts asks of clients

---

### `off_compare_products`

Side-by-side nutrition and scoring comparison for 2–10 barcodes.

- Accepts 2–10 barcodes, compared in the order provided
- Returns a normalized comparison table: energy (kcal/100g), fat, saturated fat, sugars, salt, protein, fiber, Nutri-Score, NOVA group, and Green-Score
- Missing nutrition data is preserved as `null` — comparisons are not imputed or estimated
- `not_found` list identifies barcodes with no contributor record (partial results are not an error)
- `failed` list identifies barcodes whose fetch failed, with the per-barcode reason — kept separate from `not_found`, which claims the opposite. A failed barcode never blocks the rows that resolved

---

### `off_browse_taxonomy`

Resolve a human term to the canonical Open Food Facts tag ID before building `off_search_products` filters.

- Facets: `categories`, `labels`, `allergens`, `additives`, `countries`, `nova_groups`, `nutrition_grades`
- With a `search` term, the five open facets resolve against the live Open Food Facts taxonomy — tens of thousands of category tags, not a fixed local list. Matching is case-insensitive substring against tag ID or display name (e.g., `"gluten"` → `en:no-gluten`, `en:gluten-free`)
- Upstream tags are often plural (`"kombucha"` → `en:kombuchas`) — pass the returned `id` through unchanged rather than constructing one
- `nova_groups` and `nutrition_grades` are closed vocabularies answered offline and returned complete. Their IDs are bare (`1`–`4`, `a`–`e`), matching what `off_search_products` accepts
- Live results are merged behind an in-process sample that also serves offline operation. If Open Food Facts is unreachable or the taxonomy budget is spent, the tool answers from that sample and says so rather than failing — an empty result is never presented as an authoritative "no such tag"
- Omitting `search` lists only the offline sample. The upstream taxonomy endpoint suggests against a term and cannot enumerate a facet, so an unfiltered call is not a view of the full vocabulary and reports no facet total
- `limit` controls results returned (1–100, default 20). There is no offset or page input — the upstream endpoint offers no cursor, so narrow the term instead
- Taxonomy lookups carry their own ~10 requests/min client-side budget, separate from the search budget

---

## Features

Built on [`@cyanheads/mcp-ts-core`](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@cyanheads/mcp-ts-core):

- Declarative tool definitions — single file per tool, framework handles registration and validation
- Unified error handling — handlers throw, framework catches, classifies, and formats
- Pluggable auth: `none`, `jwt`, `oauth`
- Swappable storage backends: `in-memory`, `filesystem`, `Supabase`, `Cloudflare KV/R2/D1`
- Structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing
- STDIO and Streamable HTTP transports

Open Food Facts-specific:

- No API key required — the identifying `User-Agent` header (required by OFF terms) is baked into the service layer
- Token-bucket rate limiting per endpoint class: product reads (~15/min), search (~10/min), taxonomy resolution (~10/min). The product and search defaults are the per-IP ceilings Open Food Facts publishes; lower them on a shared outbound IP. A local refusal says so — it never reports itself as an Open Food Facts rate limit
- Automatic retry (3 attempts, 500ms base) for transient failures only — 5xx, timeouts, and 429 (honoring `Retry-After`), with HTML error page detection for 503 during high load. A 4xx is never retried; the upstream's own explan