Expanding the New Zealand Food Composition Database for greater usefulness to the nutrition community

A Te Ao Māori (Māori) perspective teaches us that food cannot be separated from land, water, or people. This view is increasingly shared by scientists, policymakers, and industry leaders seeking to address the complexity of food system sustainability, but New Zealand (NZ) data systems have not caught up with this reality. Previous research in NZ that matches economic, environmental, nutrition and health data for food has been inconsistent or partial, leaving findings and positions less comparable. The one consistent resource has been the NZ Food Composition Database (NZFCD), the national standard repository for the nutritional content of food. The NZFCD is jointly owned by the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science and the Ministry of Health. It contains 2857 foods with up to 434 components, and its maintenance is funded by the NZ government. The NZ nutrition community place high trust in the NZFCD and its rigorous and transparent data, and it has diverse uses. Here we report on the planned expansion of the NZFCD into a multi-tiered resource spanning diverse food information, including food labelling, environmental impact, and economic indicators. This follows consultation with the sector on future-proofing the NZFCD, where branded foods data, along with data to support broader sustainability research, were raised as useful future directions. The current version of the NZFCD contains largely generic or aggregate food items of relevance to NZ food consumption and a set of core components for these foods. The data are highly reliable, drawing largely on analytical composition data produced by independent laboratories and using a nationally representative sample of each food. However, generating such data is expensive and time-consuming, meaning new foods are often added years after becoming widely consumed and existing records are only updated sporadically. A new tiered approach will extend the NZFCD and contain four classes of data: Class 1: NZ analytical data (the majority of the existing data in the NZFCD); Class 2: Data borrowed from international sources or calculated by recipe or extrapolation; Class 3: Branded food items, including nutrition information panel and claims data; Class 4: Specialised datasets for specific foods or components, e.g. phytochemicals. In addition, sustainability indicators for food items and groups will be added, including greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and retail price. These data will be drawn from both NZ and international datasets (1,2) , appropriately adjusted to provide representative NZ values. These data will be available via the interactive NZFCD website and available for download, with users able to specify which parts of the enlarged dataset they require. A unified source of broad sustainability data for NZ foods will standardise approaches to investigating the sustainability of diets and provide useful information for food formulation to meet nutritional and environmental targets.