{{unreferenced, date=October 2016 The International Food Code (IFC) is a code which uniquely identifies foods from national

food composition database Food composition data (FCD) are detailed sets of information on the nutritionally important components of foods and provide values for energy and nutrients including protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals and for other important food com ...

s (FCDBs) around the world. It has also become popular among suppliers and manufacturers to uniquely identify their food products (see "Use on barcodes and numeric systems" below).

Structure of an IFC

The IFC begins with a database identifier: An

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of ...

code which identifies the source country, followed by a two digit code which represents the year of publication of the source database. A dot is usually used to separate the database identifier from the food code used by the publisher. The publisher's code can be up to 8 characters long, so the maximum length for an IFC is 12 characters, excluding the optional dot.

Examples

GB15.14-318

The code above shows "''Bananas, flesh only''" from UK published "''COFIDS Includes McCance & Widdowson 7th ed. 2015''"

IE09.5068

The code above shows "''Porridge, made with low fat milk''" from Irish published "''Irish Food Composition database 2009''"

US15.15083

The code above shows "''Fish, salmon, pink, raw''" from US published "''United States Department of Agriculture, SR28 2015''"

Use on Barcodes and numeric systems

A common variation on the IFC structure is to replace the leading

letters with thei
numeric equivalents
The publisher's code is then prefixed with leading zeros and the dot is excluded to create a 13 digit code. This allows the IFC to be used as a unique numeric code for UPC-A barcodes or other numeric systems. Example: GB15.14-318 becomes 8261500014318 Unique identifiers