Press kit for MyPlate.food, the free independent rebuild of the USDA MyPlate nutrition tools shut down in January 2026: fact sheet, ready-to-use press release, founder quotes, and downloadable assets.
When the U.S. Department of Agriculture retired MyPlate.gov in January 2026 during the transition to the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines, the government's most-used consumer nutrition tools went offline: the MyPlate Plan calculator, the MyPlate Kitchen archive of more than a thousand recipes, and the printable materials that teachers and dietitians had built lessons around for over a decade.
MyPlate.food, an independent, free rebuild founded and built by Lucas Czekaj, preserves and continues those tools. The site's calculator produces the same personalized daily food-group plan using the published Institute of Medicine equations; all 1,072 USDA recipes are preserved with complete nutrition data and available in English, Spanish, French, and Korean; and the tip sheets, worksheets, and quizzes are recreated in print-ready form for classrooms. Every tool is free and works without an account.
Czekaj moved to the United States from Poland in 2015; his culture shock, he says, was the grocery store — sugar and sodium in everything, and almost no education about what good food looks like. He went on to build Instacart's health platform before leaving to work on the nutrition side of groceries independently — which is how, when the government retired its nutrition tools, he was positioned to preserve them.
MyPlate.food is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USDA. The site serves more than 60,000 pageviews a month and is used by teachers, dietitians, and households in all 50 states.
Contact: hello@myplate.food · Assets and fact sheet: myplate.food/press
Attribute to "Lucas Czekaj, founder of MyPlate.food."
"My culture shock when I moved here from Poland was the grocery store — sugar and sodium in everything, and almost no education about what good food looks like. Everything I've built since, from Instacart's health platform to this site, comes from that frustration."
"Public nutrition guidance shouldn't disappear because a website got decommissioned. The math, the recipes, the teaching materials — the public funded them, and they still work."
"I'm a software engineer, not a dietitian — so the site shows its work. Every number traces to the published Institute of Medicine equations and USDA tables, with the methodology one click away."
hello@myplate.food — replies within a day; interviews welcome. Downloadable brand assets — horizontal lockups (light and dark), the plate icon, and the social image — are at myplate.food/press. Any page may be screenshotted for editorial use.