The importance of harmonizing food composition data across Europe.

Objective: To examine the role of food composition data in Europe in four sectors, namely health, trade regulation and legislation, agriculture and the environment.
Results: The need for further harmonization of data across Europe is clearly identified and evidenced from a number of previous successful European collaborations.
Conclusions: Data on the nutritional composition of foods are essential for a broad spectrum of activities, including public health nutrition, research, the food industry and government policy development and implementation. With the expansion of the European Union and the concomitant increase in cross border trade and cooperation harmonizing food composition data becomes a more important issue than ever. Harmonization is not solely a technical issue, but also involves creating durable and sustainable structures to maintain the viability of the data. These are some of the issues currently being addressed by the European Food Information Resource Network of Excellence.