EuroFIR – Food Transport

EuroFIR-FoodTransport 1.0.0

[ Base URL: qsp-api.thehyve.net/foodtransport/beta ]

Date: June 2018

Version: EuroFIR-FoodTransport-Qusiper2018-V1

This web service for food composition data allows users to simultaneously search information from most EU Member States as well as Canada, USA, Japan, and New Zealand. The data provided is on the nutritionally important components of foods and provides values for energy and nutrients including protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals.

The data is provided by national food composition data compilers and is made available in the searchable format through the European Food Information Resource (EuroFIR) AISBL (www.eurofir.org). Foods included cover almost all foods that are commonly consumed. Each national dataset contains different numbers of foods with different levels of detail but it is possible to retrieve composition data for almost any food and most nutritionally important nutrients. Foods and nutrients are linked through a harmonised food description system (LanguaL) with food names in both the original language and English, standardised components, and descriptions of the values (e.g. source of data, analytical or calculation method, descriptive statistics) using EuroFIR thesauri (standard vocabularies) (http://www.eurofir.org/our-resources/eurofir-thesauri/).

The provision of high quality data in the food composition databases (FCDBs) linked with EuroFIR is one of the most important goals of the EuroFIR network. Therefore, skilled and experienced technical experts are continuously working towards improving the content and quality of the data in their national FCDBs. The data are described as thoroughly as possible to enable data to be comparable between countries and to be available for all users for a wide range of applications.

The FoodTransport service includes options to search for food by name, type of food, or by the most common food descriptors (e.g. cooking method, food processing methods, added ingredients). The service has the unique ability to compare component values between foods from different countries. Results can be downloaded as a specialized form of XML (Food Data Transport Package (FDTP)), that can be imported into spreadsheets or databases.

For more information on the technical details of the EuroFIR FoodTransport webservice and on syntax and allowed requests see technical documentation (https://developer.quisper.eu/pdfs/FoodTransport.pdf).

Data available for use comprise data from the national FCDBs linked with EuroFIR (http://www.eurofir.org/food-information/food-composition-databases/).