Monitoring food and nutrition is of significant public health importance. Overall, dietary risks were the third-leading risk factor contributing to the total burden of disease and injury in Australia for 2015. Monitoring requires timely, reliable, consistent and accessible data related to food supply, food purchasing and acquisition, food and physical activity behaviours, and nutritional status.

There are, however, limitations to many of the data sources traditionally used in food and nutrition monitoring. Several of the traditional data sources are infrequently and/or irregularly collected, are subject to various biases, are expensive to collect, and/or have a high participant burden. The increasing creation and collection of data via less traditional means provides opportunities for novel sources that can potentially fill some of these gaps.

This report provides information about novel data sources that could be used for monitoring food and nutrition to guide future use and strengthen the evidence available for policy makers. It includes example analyses of 3 data sources—purchase data, electronic payment data and location data—to highlight the potential uses of, and considerations when using, such data sources.