Sources & Licences

What we build on

FSANZ — Australian Food Composition Database

Our nutrition backbone. The Australian Food Composition Database is published by Food Standards Australia New Zealand under CC BY-SA 3.0 — attribution required, and anything built on it must be shared alike. We do both: FSANZ is credited on every food page it informs, and our compiled corpus carries a share-alike licence (below).

USDA FoodData Central

Nutrition data for foods the Australian tables don't cover comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central. As a work of the U.S. government it's public domain — no credit is legally required, so this one is a courtesy: thank you, USDA.

Our World in Data — Poore & Nemecek (2018)

The planet-lens footprints (CO₂e, land, water) start from Our World in Data's environmental impacts of food, based on Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018), Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science. Published under CC BY — attribution required, and given here and on the pages that use it. These figures are global means across very different farms; where we show them, we say so.

Agribalyse 3.2 — ADEME

Where a food needs a finer-grained footprint than a global mean, we draw on Agribalyse 3.2, the environmental database built by ADEME, the French Agency for Ecological Transition. Credited on the pages it informs.

FoodKeeper

Shelf-life and storage reference data ("keeps about…") comes from FoodKeeper, the storage guide maintained by the USDA with Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute. It's reference data, not a verdict — your nose outranks the table.

Open Food Facts

The Cubud app's barcode path looks products up in Open Food Facts, the open product database built by volunteers, published under the Open Database License (ODbL). Data we surface from it is credited to Open Food Facts, and anything we contribute back stays under the same licence.

What we publish

Cubud's compiled corpus — the food pages on this site, with their hierarchy, provenance chains, and derived values — is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You can copy it, reshape it, and build on it, including commercially, as long as you credit Cubud and release what you build on it under the same share-alike terms. That's not generosity so much as obligation passed on: the share-alike condition on the FSANZ data flows through everything we compiled from it, and we think that's how public food data should work anyway.

One honest caveat

These sources don't always agree, and none of them — us included — is the last word. Where the data is thin or contested, the page says so rather than smoothing it over. Cubud is a reference, not dietary or medical advice; for anything that matters to your health, check the label and ask someone qualified.

Spotted a credit we've missed or got wrong? Tell us via the support page and we'll fix it.