The Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD) is a reference database containing information on the nutrient content of foods commonly available in Australia. The data is primarily sourced from high-quality laboratory analysis.
What’s in the latest release
Release 3 of the Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD) includes data for 1,588 foods. This release incorporates new analytical data for 118 foods and an updated vitamin D dataset.
Foods
The term ‘food’ refers to all foods, beverages and ingredients in AFCD, and focuses on foods that are commonly eaten by Australians or used as ingredients in other foods.
For more information see Release 3 – Food details (Excel, 1.1MB).
Nutrients
The term ‘nutrient’ refers to traditional nutrients like vitamins and minerals, and other components of interest, like energy and caffeine. AFCD reports 58 core nutrients to align with our survey database, AUSNUT 2023 but may include another 210 nutrients, such as amino acids, organic acids, and individual fatty acids, depending on the data available.
For more information about the nutrients reported including the units, derivation, assumptions and limitations see Release 3 – Nutrient details (Excel, 102KB).
For the full list of food nutrient profiles see Release 3 – Nutrient profiles (Excel, 2MB).
Sources of nutrient data
AFCD contains mainly analytical data. However, data is also sourced using other techniques such as recipe calculations.
To help identify where the nutrient data comes from, each food is assigned a derivation. Further information on the origin of the nutrient data, such as the year samples were analysed, or the country from which data was borrowed, can be found in the sampling details. The derivation and sampling details are provided in Release 3 – Food details (Excel, 1.1MB).
More information
More information about the updates in Release 3 can be found in Release 3 – Food group information (Excel, 886KB).
Detailed information about the development and content of the data is provided in About the Australian Food Composition Database – Release 3 (PDF, 204KB).