Big Appetite for Food Dashboard

The Prevention Centre was joined by more than 300 stakeholders for the virtual launch of Australia’s first Food Environment Dashboard last month. Partnering with the Global Obesity Centre and the Obesity Policy Coalition this initiative for benchmarking food environments will be a powerful tool for policy, research and advocacy. The dashboard developed by the leadership of Assoc/Prof Gary Sacks and INFORMAS brings together the best available and most up-to-date data on all aspects of Australia’s food environments including key indicators of the healthiness of our food supply, labelling, pricing, marketing, and government and company policies.

The #AusFoodDashboard launch attracted an impressive mix of stakeholders with 40% of the audience academics/researchers, 25% from government, 23% from the food industry and the remaining 12% from NGOs/other. Guest speakers included Prof Boyd Swinburn, Prof Anna Peeters, Prof Amanda Lee, A/Prof Gary Sacks, A/Prof Adrian Cameron, A/Prof Bridget Kelly, A/Prof Kathryn Backholer, Dr Alexandra Jones and Dr Jane Martin.

Overwhelmingly positive feedback highlighted that the short sessions with multiple speakers were engaging and informative with the dashboard a “very easy to read and understand”, “a terrific resource” and “incredibly useful”. The first week of the dashboard being live saw more than 3,000 unique users with each spending an average of close to three minutes on the site showing strong engagement with the content.

Deakin University tracked media coverage of the dashboard in the week following the launch with a potential audience reach of nearly 4.5million people. An article in The Conversation attracted more than 55,000 readers in the first week with over 120 comments online.