Why a 20 million food database isn't as useful as it sounds
Arcal · Last updated August 23, 2026
MyFitnessPal's food database is the largest in the category, over 20 million entries, and it is a real advantage for packaged and branded food. It is also crowd-sourced, meaning any user can submit an entry, and that comes with a specific, well-documented accuracy problem that database size does not fix.
More entries is not the same as more correct entries
A crowd-sourced database grows by letting users add and edit entries. That is how it reached 20 million rows faster than any single company could manually verify. It also means duplicate entries for the same food with different calorie counts, outdated entries left over from reformulated products, and manual entry errors that never get corrected because nobody flags them. Searching "grilled chicken breast" can surface a dozen near-identical entries with meaningfully different numbers, and the app has no way to tell you which one is right.
Database size solves a different problem than accuracy
A large database is genuinely good at coverage: the odds that a specific packaged product or restaurant item exists in the database at all. It does not help with correctness once you have found it, and it does not help at all with food that was never packaged or branded to begin with, a home-cooked meal, a meal from a restaurant with no chain presence, anything assembled from a few raw ingredients. For that category of food, which is most of what a lot of people actually eat, database size is not the relevant variable.
What this means practically
If most of what you log has a barcode, a large crowd-sourced database is a real, useful advantage, so long as you take a moment to pick a sensible-looking entry over the closest-named one. If most of what you eat does not have a barcode, database size was never the thing solving your problem. That is the specific gap AI photo scanning is built to address instead, by estimating a meal directly rather than searching for someone else's entry for it. See Arcal vs MyFitnessPal or join the waitlist.