Deep learning accurately predicts food categories and nutrients based on ingredient statements

Determining attributes such as classification, creating taxonomies and nutrients for foods can be a challenging and resource-intensive task, albeit important for a better understanding of foods. In this study, a novel dataset, 134 k BFPD, was collected from USDA Branded Food Products Database with modification and labeled with three food taxonomy and nutrient values and became an artificial intelligence (AI) dataset that covered the largest food types to date. Overall, the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-TF-SE method obtained the highest learning efficiency for food natural language processing tasks using AI, which achieved up to 99% accuracy for food classification and 0.98 R² for calcium estimation (0.93 ∼ 0.97 for calories, protein, sodium, total carbohydrate, total lipids, etc.). The deep learning approach has great potential to be embedded in other food classification and regression tasks and as an extension to other applications in the food and nutrient scope.