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Poor diet is now associated with ill health in most countries. Better food choices can be supported by quality labelling. The FoodSwitch app was designed to show consumers at-a-glance nutritional information while supporting the collation of data to drive industry improvements and government policy. By scanning the barcode using a smartphone’s camera, FoodSwitch presents an overall nutritional profile of foods to the consumer, and suggests similar healthier alternative products. A crowd-sourcing function was built into FoodSwitch to allow users to send in photos of missing items. FoodSwitch has >700,000 downloads to date, and has been launched in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, South Africa, China and India, with the United States (US) planned for 2017. Crowd-sourcing has resulted in 1 million photos of new food items contributed by users, equating to >100,000 new products being added to the database. A version for hypertension (SaltSwitch), and celiac disease (GlutenSwitch) and filters for sugar, saturated fat and energy have been launched. International interest in technologies supporting FoodSwitch has identified the system as a new method for tracking the global food supply. The huge volume of data crowd-sourced is enabling improvements to the broader food environment by holding industry and government to account for their performance.

Excess dietary sodium is a modifiable cause of high blood pressure. The World Health Organization has targeted a 30 % reduction in mean population sodium consumption by 2025. In 2008, members of the International Food and Beverage Alliance (IFBA) made commitments to lower sodium content in their products. The aim of this study was to determine recent changes in sodium levels between 2013 and 2017 in foods and beverages produced by companies that are IFBA members (n = 10) and non-IFBA members (n = 6) that were included in the 2018 Global Access to Nutrition Index operating in Australia. Independent Samples t-tests and Mann Whitney U tests were used to test the differences in sodium levels. There was no clear difference in sodium content between 2013 and 2017 detectable for the IFBA members (mean difference 17 mg/100 g, 95 % confidence interval (CI), –82 to +48; p = 0.612; median difference 27 mg/100 g, p = 0.582). For the non-IFBA companies there was a decrease in median sodium content (−30 mg/100 g; P = 0.002) but not mean sodium content (−52 mg/100 g, 95 % CI −106 to +3; p = 0.064). Sodium reduction in IFBA companies appear to have had slow progress in Australia. Stronger implementation and monitoring programs are needed to drive industry action.