Above photo by Falco Negenman on Unsplash.

This current gap in both methodology and data to measure and understand the phenomenon of Food Consumed Away From Home (FCAFH) raises serious concern. If left unaddressed it could potentially result in maladapted or inadequate policies and interventions with important unintended consequences for the nutritional and health status of the hundreds of millions of individuals who depend on FCAFH to access food every day, either at work (canteen, street vendors, vending machines) or for leisure (restaurants, fast food, etc.).

The overall objective of this project is to help in addressing this methodological and information gap. Project researchers will design, field-test and validate a survey module that captures critical information around the nutritional dimension of FCAFH that can be incorporated into the household surveys routinely conducted in LMICs.

The large-scale translational value of the project is in strengthening the capacities of practitioners and policy makers in LMICs to make evidence-based decisions to design effective regulatory policies and interventions and respond to the rapidly expanding phenomenon of FCAFH. Through those policies and interventions, the intended long-term impact of the project will be to support healthier FCAFH practices and to reduce the adoption of unhealthy ones. As such, the project will contribute to a better connection between supply of good nutritional quality food and healthy consumption, thus contributing to support public policies on the nexus agriculture-food-health.