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Searching by food will produce all of the food names which contain the words entered as search criteria and the corresponding food codes. By clicking on the food code for which the food name best matches your choices, you will first be taken to the serving size page, where you can select one or more serving sizes and generate a nutrient profile for that food and each of the selected serving sizes.

When searching with words| Requiring/excluding words| Case sensitivity| Special characters| Wildcards

Word searching

This is the simplest type of search. Any word entered will be matched against any word found in food names, or part thereof. 'Fish' will find 'Catfish', and 'mix' will find 'mixed'. See the 'Wildcard Searching ' section.

Simply enter the word that describes what you want to search for:

• 'Milk', for foods containing the word milk. This will provide you with a list of foods that contain the word milk, but also buttermilk.

Requiring/excluding words

Often you will know a word that will be guaranteed to appear in many foods but want to refine your search to limit your results. This can be accomplished with the operators 'and', 'or', and 'not'. A space is equivalent to the operator 'and'.

• 'Milk and potatoes' will give results for all foods containing the combination of both words anywhere in a food name, in any order. Note that 'potatoes' will not find foods with 'potato' in their name, but searching by 'potato' will find 'potatoes' since 'potato' is included in 'potatoes'.
• 'Milk or potatoes' will give you all the foods that contain 'milk' in the food name, all the foods that contain 'potatoes' in the food name and all the foods that contain the combination of both words in any order.

On the other hand, you can eliminate a food by adding 'not' in the search.

• 'Milk not frozen' will give you all the food names with 'milk' but exclude those that are frozen.
• 'Milk and potatoes not frozen' will give you all the food names with 'milk' and 'potatoes' in combination but exclude those that are frozen. The operators 'and' and 'or' are always applied first, before 'not' is applied.

Case sensitivity

If you search a word in upper and/or lower case, the engine will retrieve all documents containing this word regardless of its capitalization.

• MILK finds milk
• POtaTOEs will find potatoes

Special characters

It is not necessary to write the accents (used mostly in French) to find a food.

• Rosé finds rosé
• Rose will also find rosé

Wildcard searching

There is no wildcard character used. The search keywords provided are not searched as words per se (i.e. surrounded by spaces) in food names. Rather, they are always considered as strings of characters. This is how plurals will be found using singular forms, prefixed forms will also be found, and the keywords will always be searched anywhere in food names. The more characters provided, the more restrictive the search, and conversely.

• Straw will find strawberries or strawberry
• Pot will find potatoes and beef pot roast

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