Pilot Cases on Data Transfer from the Food Industry to European National Food Composition Databases

Food composition databases (FCDBs) are used for various purposes. They are used for preventive education in health care, for calculating nutrient intake in food consumption studies, for educational purposes and for labelling purposes by the food industry. The variety of foods available to purchase is immense and, in particular, the number and variety of manufactured foods is growing each year. The content of national FCDBs needs to be updated regularly due to the introduction of new foods to the market and changes in food production as well as processing

practices.

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Greenfield and Southgate (2003) have stated that ideally a FCDB should cover all foods that are essential to calculating the intake of each nutrient. Timely changes in food selection should be recognised, but this demands that introduction of new branded food items and changes in the composition of existing food items are taken into account. Aspects for data transfer are presented in section 2. The Dutch pilot case (see section 3.1) presents clear difficulties in the routine work involved in the management of FCDBs. Due to the limited resources of compilers of FCDBs, the numbers of both foods and nutrients need to be kept manageable. Electronic data transfer direct from the food manufacturers or from food industry databanks into a FCDB would facilitate the updating procedure, and has the advantage of reducing the time taken for data collection.

The Belgian system proves that direct electronic data transfer is possible (section 3.2). There are interesting features and developmental steps in the Belgian solution for management of their national FCDB, NUBEL. Electronic data transfer does not nullify the need for evaluation of the compositional data but it eases the effort required by the compilers to add new products and update existing ones in a FCDB.

In this report, the Italian pilot case also describes an example of data transfer from manufacturers to the national FCDB and current collaboration with food industry (section 3.3). Further a pilot case from Finland describes a pilot transfer of composition data for dietary supplements to the national FCDB (section 3.4). A description of an industrial branded food database, SINFOS (Finland), is also included (section 3.5).

FCDBs can also be linked with several sources for food consumption data. The national availability of food items can be followed by market analysis (e.g. Nielsen 2005) which also shows volumes sold for selected food groups and changes in the amounts sold. This is a fast way to collect information on market trends. However, for selection of updating priorities, such information often has to be evaluated against dietary surveys where the importance of food items or food groups as energy and nutrient sources can be assessed. Examples of where this has been done are the national dietary surveys in the Netherlands (Voedingscentrum 1998), in Finland (Männistö et al. 2003) and in the UK (Henderson et al. 2003).