Introducing the Swiss Food Knowledge Graph: AI for Context-Aware Nutrition Recommendation

Artificial intelligence has driven significant progress in the nutrition field, especially through multimedia-based automatic dietary assessment. However, existing automatic dietary assessment systems often overlook critical non-visual factors, such as ingredient substitutions that can significantly alter nutritional content, and rarely account for individual dietary needs, including allergies, restrictions, and preferences. In Switzerland, while food-related information is available, it remains fragmented, and no centralized repository integrates all relevant nutrition-related aspects within a Swiss context. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Swiss Food Knowledge Graph (SwissFKG), the first resource, to our best knowledge, to ever unite recipes, ingredients, and their substitutions with nutrient data, dietary restrictions, allergen information, and national nutrition guidelines under one graph. We establish a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered enrichment pipeline for populating the graph, whereby we further present the first benchmark of four off-the-shelf (<70 B parameter) LLMs for food knowledge augmentation. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can effectively enrich the graph with relevant nutritional information. Our SwissFKG goes beyond recipe recommendations by offering ingredient-level information such as allergen and dietary restriction information, and guidance aligned with nutritional guidelines. Moreover, we implement a Graph-Retrieval Augmented Generation (Graph-RAG) application to showcase how the SwissFKG's rich natural-language data structure can help LLM answer user-specific nutrition queries, and we evaluate LLM-embedding pairings by comparing user-query responses against predefined expected answers. As such, our work lays the foundation for the next generation of dietary assessment tools that blend visual, contextual, and cultural dimensions of eating.