FoodEx2

Food lists

For exposure assessment of chemical substances in foods it is a common approach to use a list of foods; this list contains descriptions of foods which are used in the food consumption surveys. Using the list the consumers are asked which foods they have consumed and how much. Using literal descriptions for the foods is prone to errors, e.g. typos can lead to different foods when the same foods are intended.

Many surveys use a list that is especially developed for the study. There are good reasons for this approach; different populations can have different foods, and some foods found in one part of the worlds are not even available in other parts. As an example: "cassava" is found in the GIFT database in African countries like Benin, Congo, and Nigeria, while "sole" is only noted for Italy, Argentina, Cyprus, and the Netherlands.

EFSA

EFSA collects food consumption surveys from European countries for PRIMo and the Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database. National surveys are uploaded to an EFSA database. The countries are requested to follow a Standard Sample Description data model (now SSD2) for describing samples and analytical results. For foods a standardized system is developed, called FoodEx2. EFSA notes:" Central to the system is a core list of food items or generic food descriptions that represent the minimum level of detail ... Facets are used to add further detail ..". More information can be found in an EFSA Technical Report of April 2015. Besides EFSA has developed the "Foodex2 Browser".

FoodEx and the Foodsafetyportal

In the current situation is the use of FoodEx2 codes growing; more consumption surveys provide a FoodEx2 code next to a textual descriptor of the foods in the inquiry. Older studies however lack FoodEx2 codes as it is quite a challenge to update these studies accordingly. Foods are searched using (a part of) the food's name in all versions of EAST; foods complying to the search name are shown for further selection. The surveys of the WHO/FAO GIFT databases include also the FoodEx2 descriptors next to the descriptive name. Therefore one can search in GIFTT for foods using the FoodEx2 code, or by the name in English, or in some cases also by the local language. To support the use of FoodEx2 code, an online tool is available to search the food's name for conversion into its FoodEx2 code. With that tool one can also translate a given FoodEx2 code into the descriptive name according to EFSA.
To start the translator tool, click its icon