The content of nutrients and bio-active compounds are important to know when marketing tropical fruits, or when deciding which fruits to produce. However, this information is not always readily available. Many food composition tables do include few if any of tropical fruits. It is time-consuming to collect, evaluate and compile those data from the scientific literature. It is even more expensive to analyse them.
In order to assist countries and stakeholders to easily access compiled analytical data on the composition of foods, including tropical fruits, FAO publishes regular updates of the FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Database for Biodiversity and of the FAO/INFOODS Analytical Food Composition Database (see http://www.fao.org/infoods/infoods/tables-and-databases/faoinfoods-databases/en/ ). Even though these databases do not provide complete food composition profiles, they represent compositional data of sufficient quality and show the variations in composition due to genetics (mainly the biodiversity database) but also of other factors such as soil, season, processing (analytical database). These data are useful e.g. for researchers, producers, policy makers, and for labelling purposes.
Concerning fruits, there are 1690 entries in the biodiversity database, out of which many are on tropical fruits, and none in the analytical database yet. These data represent only a small part of the generated analytical data as they are not necessarily published in the scientific literature and not all fruits were included in the search done by FAO so far. It would be beneficial for all users, including those in the TFNet, if these databases would contain more of the available data on tropical fruits. Therefore, FAO would encourage those having analytical data on the composition of tropical fruits to compile them into the required format and send them to FAO to be published in one of the databases. The format is available under ‘Share your analytical data’ at the bottom of http://www.fao.org/infoods/infoods/tables-and-databases/faoinfoods-databases/en/ .
The publication of more data on tropical fruits in the FAO/INFOODS databases would be useful to better promote tropical fruits, including superfruits.