Smarter food data – Oceania Foods Conference 2019

In September, we attended the 10th Oceania Foods conference, Smarter Data 2019, in Auckland, NZ.

This exciting event brought together food composition experts from across the South Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, with delegates from diverse backgrounds including research, public health, food technology and information technology.

This conference was a natural fit for us. We are committed both to this region and to helping to provide the best possible food composition data to our users. As gold sponsors, our representative, Tony Ng, was invited to give a short welcome address to all the delegates.

Tony reported that the overwhelming message of the conference, eloquently expressed by keynote speaker Barbara Burlingame, Professor of Public Health and Food Systems at Massey University, was just how essential it is to fund and prioritise the provision of high quality food composition data.

This data is needed to properly underpin not just public health and individual health care, but many areas of public policy – including the environment, sustainability, food security and agriculture.

Oceania Foods is the Pacific regional operation of INFOODS (the International Network of Food Data Systems), which was established in 1984 under the auspices of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).  INFOODS is a worldwide network of food composition experts aiming to improve the quality, availability, reliability and use of food composition data.