Food Data Central Dialog
Here you can add ingredients from the USDA food database.
Search
Type in what you are looking for and press the search button. The list will be populated with ingredients matching you search words.
Brand owner
If you look for a specific brand you can type this in here and press search again.
Note, this is the Brand owner and not the Brand from the FDC and this only works for Branded foods.
FDCID
If you know the ID of the item you look for you can type it in here.
Database
The USDA food database is actually several different databases. You can limit the search to a specific database here.
Require all words
If this is checked all search words must exist in the ingredient.
Type of ingredient
Set the type of ingredient to help the calculator to calculate the data that is not available in the nutrition data.
Ingredients
For branded ingredients they usually have an ingredient list. The ingredients here will be transferred to the sub-ingredients.
AI button
Instead of pressing OK to create the ingredient you can press the AI button.
This button will use AI to generate the ingredient.
The benefits of using AI is that the AI can estimate ice cream specific data better.
For example when adding complex ingredients that contain both dairy and chocolate the AI can estimate MSNF, Butter fat, Cocoa fat and Cocoa solids.
The AI is also better at calculating Water content in ingredients by estimating the Ash content.
After import the rationale and confidence of the AI is added to the Notes so you can see what the AI has done.
Notes!
Important. In the database some ingredients are by 100ml instead of 100g. In this case I assume that 100ml weighs 100g. This is probably not correct but there is no way to know the density of the ingredient from the database in these cases. So, be aware that the calculated data might not be 100% correct for ingredients that are stored with volume units. If the serving size unit is not defined as ‘g’ in the database a warning is displayed to the right of the serving size field.