How the numbers are gathered

Every figure on this site is taken from the restaurant's published nutrition guide — or, where the chain's own document could not be read from its site, from a linked copy of it hosted by a third party, labelled as such on the chain's page. This page explains how a figure gets from that document to these tables, and what gets left out.

1. Official documents first

For each chain we start from the nutrition guide the restaurant publishes — usually a PDF or a nutrition page on the chain's own domain. Where a chain's own document is unavailable or unreadable, a copy of that guide hosted elsewhere — a nutrition mirror site or a CDN — may be used temporarily; those chains say "third-party host" next to the source at the top of the page (12 of 29 chains today). The exact source for every chain is listed, with a link, on the sources page.

2. Extraction

The document is read into a structured table: item name, calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and sodium, each row tagged with the URL it came from. Values are kept as published and rounded to whole numbers; nothing is estimated or filled in. When a source does not publish a macro for an item, the cell shows a dash — never a zero — and the chain's page says which macros are missing. Rows that repeat the same name and calories are listed once; sized variants that share a name but differ in calories are all kept.

3. Validation gate

Before a row appears on the site it must pass a plausibility check. A row is dropped when:

• its calories are under 15 (water, diet drinks, condiment packets);
• its macros cannot add up — protein or carbohydrates above roughly 27% of calories per gram, or fat above roughly 12% (4 kcal per gram of protein and carbs, 9 kcal per gram of fat, with 10% slack) — which catches misread rows such as an 880 g taco;
• its name or category marks it as a sauce, dressing, topping, packet, plain drink (water, coffee, tea, soda by brand name, milk, juice, lemonade, smoothie, slush, beer, wine), or a catering tray, party pack or gallon. The name is judged with its qualifiers removed and never overrides a dish word, so "Caesar Salad (w/o dressing)", "French Dip Sandwich" and "Vanilla Milk Shake" stay, while "Ranch Dressing" and "Sandwich Tray" go.

Ranked tables apply two more rules: the lowest-calorie table only shows meal-sized items (at least 150 calories or 10 g protein), and the highest-protein table is limited to items of 700 calories or less and appears only when the top row has at least 10 g of protein. The full table on each chain page lists every row that passed the gate.

4. Weekly refresh

Menus are re-checked against their sources on a schedule, and the site is rebuilt every Sunday from the current data. Each page shows the date its data was last refreshed. Pages whose data did not change keep their previous date.

5. Corrections

If a number looks wrong, email support@eatminmax.com with the chain, the item and a link to the restaurant's published figure. Confirmed errors are corrected in the next refresh.

Limits

Restaurants change recipes and portions, and regional menus differ. Figures here are for planning; the restaurant's own current publication is the final word. More on how nutrition data is handled: legal.eatminmax.com/nutrition.

Use the data

Each chain's gated table is available as JSON at /data/<chain>.json (for example /data/mcdonalds.json) under CC BY 4.0 — compiled by MinMax (eatminmax.com) from each restaurant's published nutrition guide, or a cited third-party-hosted copy of it where the chain's own document could not be read; source URL cited per item. See /llms.txt for a machine-readable summary.