Background
Taking place every four years, the International Food Data Conference presents itself as the most important appointment in the world of Food Composition Data. On its 14th edition, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) hosted the event at its headquarters in Rome, Italy. The event received the participation of the International Network of Food Data Systems (INFOODS), a network of which EuroFIR and its members are a part.
The event as seen by EuroFIR
During the three-day event, EuroFIR team and its members, participated by chairing X sessions, presenting X oral presentations and showcasing X posters on research and different European-funded projects, as well as receiving a distinctive award and networking with fellow participants.
Recognizing a career-long effort
On September 1st, EuroFIR´s Director, Paul Finglas was awarded the INFOODS Nevin Scrimshaw Award, a recognition given to professionals who, in their years of experience, have performed an outstanding job in the research of food composition, particularly in low and middle-income countries. For EuroFIR is a pleasure to join its founder in the celebration of his well-paved career, which not only includes more than a hundred scientific articles, but also efforts to make food composition data available and trustworthy in Europe and in the Global South.
Amongst other good news, after receiving his award, Paul Finglas presented the idea of building an open-access food database overseen by EFSA. Which could make food data literacy more accessible, understandable and transparent, ultimately benefiting bigger projects like policies, nutritional strategies and further research.
Later that day, our director, Dr. Hettie Schönfeldt also had the chance to chair the session on Biodiversity and food composition, and kept participating in the event during the second session with her presentation “Determining the nutrient composition of foods commonly consumed by Indians in South Africa”, where she proposed innovative alternatives to food consumption surveys, some even including social media posts, to better track and quantify food composition data when is not available.
A Verifish solution to empower consumers.
The Verifish project was represented by Dr. Siân Astley, Secretary General of EuroFIR who showcased the poster titled “Sustainability Indicators Framework for Communicating Responsible Aquafood Consumption.” The poster presented how Verifish has developed a supply chain solution for tracking environmental impact, supply management, and nutritional value metrics. To later process these data through an intuitive software tool designed to support informed decisions, healthy diets, and promote sustainability across the fisheries sector.
Promoting TrustEUFish around the globe
Dr. Marion Buso, EuroFIR researcher, representing the TrustEUFish project participated in the presentation of her poster “Challenges in providing comprehensive fish and seafood composition data”, which showcased a clear example of the relevance of Food Composition Data Bases, just like EuroFIR´s FoodEXplorer, the use and correct maintenance of such tools strengths the fisheries supply chain, as they reinforce consumers decisions and pave the way for future research opportunities.
A special thanks to our members.
The conference wouldn´t have been a success without the participation of EuroFIR´s members, not only because they enriched the conversation and engaged in interesting discussions, but also because they were also amongst the presenters. Please find a brief description of each of our colleagues´ interventions:
Heli Reinivuo – Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland.
Who presented the talk: “The new era of technical solutions of food composition data management, dietary data collection and dietary intake calculation in national dietary surveys: an example from Finland” and gave a hint on how food composition management software can be applied for nutritional monitoring at a national level.
Jelena Milešević – University of Belgrade, Serbia
Participated with her oral presentation titled: “Challenges and achievements in capacity development and harmonization of food consumption data collection in EFSA EU Menu national dietary surveys in Balkan region for dietary monitoring, sustainable healthy diets and food systems transformation”, reporting on EFSA-sponsored nutrition surveys across the Balkans, highlighting regional strengths and challenges in obtaining harmonized data to support public policy.
Maria Graça Dias – National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge, Portugal.
Explained in her presentation “Approach and resources for the sustainable update of the Portuguese Food Composition Database: a multi-source and collaborative strategy”. How can a national authority update its FCD through collaborative networks, stakeholder participation, together with analytical and digital tools.
Viktor Crabeels & Mirjana Andjelkovic – Sciensano, Belgium.
Our colleagues from Sciensano, presented in tandem their work titled “Decoding food labels: a scalable framework for ingredient identification and classification”, in which they explained how is it possible to harmonize food label information when this presents multilingual or different formatted packaging.
Marian Kjellvold – Institute of Marine Research, Norway
Presented “Bridging the Data Gap: Expert Guidelines for Reporting Analytical Data on Aquatic Foods for Use in Food Composition Databases” and shared a set of guidelines to help researchers include relevant information when reporting on aquatic food products composition. With the purpose of improving the quality and usability of the aforementioned data.
Helena Pastell – Finnish Food Authority – Finland
Explained to the public her study “The chemistry of edible insects – the impact of chitin on nutritional analysis.” where she highlighted the barriers edible insects have due to being novel foods in the market. Furthermore, she explained how the protein skeleton of insects can help better determine their nutritional value.
Silvia Lisciani – Council for Agricultural Research and Economics – Italy
During her talk “Assessing biodiversity food richness through dietary surveys: a cost-benefit approach to guide the collection of consumption and composition data at below species level in an Italian case study” , Silvia Lisciani explained the need to further include plant biodiversity consumption in consumers diets given the persistent gaps in food consumption surveys when reviewing biodiverse foods.
Antonis Vlassopoulos – Agricultural University of Athens, Greece.
Who presented not one, but two oral presentations, the first on behalf of EuroFIR´s former intern Stefania Xanthopoulou, titled “Developing the Greek branded food composition database (HelTH): update and expansion methodology”, which consisted of explaining Branded Food Composition Databases (BFCDs), and how it is possible to update and curate their information through automatic programs. Keeping databases compliant with quality standards and updated to the changing food market.
And the second, “Development of nutritional composition data for commonly consumed foods (generic foods) via statistical analysis and thematic reconfiguration of branded food composition data”, explained how artificial intelligence trained with BFCDs can bridge food composition data in areas where information is scarce, and thus provide estimated nutritional values for staple food products.
As we finish with this memoir, once again we thank every participant of the 14th International Food Data Conference, together with the hosting organisation, FAO, for making this great event the common house of food composition data and food literacy.
