Aotearoa New Zealand’s Food Environments Dashboard aims to provide an overall picture of the healthiness of Aotearoa’s food environments, highlighting areas where action is required to support healthy diets for New Zealanders. This dashboard builds upon the work of INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity/Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) Research, Monitoring and Action Support) in Aotearoa as well as other food environments researchers in the country. INFORMAS is a global network of public-interest organisations and researchers that aims to monitor, benchmark and support public and private sector actions to increase healthy food environments and reduce obesity and NCDs and their related inequalities, and the network is currently active in 60 countries.
What does Aotearoa’s Food Environments Dashboard include?
Aotearoa’s Food Environments Dashboard brings together the best-available and most up-to-date data to describe the healthiness of our food environments from research institutions and government departments across the country. The dashboard covers the key aspects of food environments including data on food composition, food labelling, food prices and affordability, food promotion, food retail, and government and food company policies.
The dashboard provides:
- An overview of each important aspect of food environments and why it is important to population nutrition and health.
- A summary of key selected indicators of the healthiness of food environments with a traffic light score assigned to each indicator, so users can easily see where food environments are likely to promote health (‘green’), need further improvement to promote health (‘amber’), and are unhealthy (‘red’).
- A summary of recommendations for government, industry, academics, and those working in public health.
- Links to relevant reports, journal articles and other sources so users can access more information.
Who should use Aotearoa’s Food Environments Dashboard?
The Dashboard is designed to provide easy-to-digest information for anyone interested in Aotearoa’s food environment, but will be especially useful for:
- informing policy makers at all levels of government;
- providing the most up-to-date statistics and research findings to support public health advocacy groups in developing their messaging and campaigns;
- summarising data and key messages for media outlets;
- providing researchers and academics with a summary of the latest research and highlighting research gaps.
Acknowledgements
Aotearoa’s Food Environments Dashboard was put together with support from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded Centre of Research Excellence in Reducing Salt Intake using Food Policy Interventions (APP1117300).
The Dashboard was modelled upon the Australian Food Environment Dashboard, and received significant support from its creators at Deakin University.
The following organisations and institutions contributed to Aotearoa’s Food Environments Dashboard:
