Compare methods

	Food Consumption Score	Individual Dietary Diversity Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2011
Originator	World Food Programme, Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM)	Gina Kennedy, Terri Ballard & Marie Claude Dop (FAO)
Type	Weighted food-group frequency index of household food consumption	Qualitative 24-hour recall pipeline for individual diet-quality assessment
Seminal source	World Food Programme (2008). Food Consumption Analysis: Calculation and Use of the Food Consumption Score in Food Security Analysis. Rome: WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Technical Guidance Sheet.	Kennedy, G., Ballard, T., & Dop, M. C. (2011). Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity. Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.
Aliases	FCS, WFP Food Consumption Score, Weighted Food Group Frequency Score	IDDS, Individual Dietary Diversity, FAO Dietary Diversity Score, Dietary Diversity Score
Related	3	4
Summary	The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme's standard household food-security indicator, defined in its 2008 VAM technical guidance. It is a weighted measure of dietary diversity and frequency: enumerators record how many days in the past week a household consumed each of a set of standard food groups, those frequencies are capped at seven and multiplied by weights reflecting each group's nutritional importance, and the weighted sum yields a score from zero to 112. Households are then classified as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food consumption using standard thresholds. Validated against caloric and other food-security measures by Wiesmann and colleagues at IFPRI, the FCS is widely used in emergency and development food-security assessments because it is fast, cheap, and proxies both diet quality and adequacy.	The Individual Dietary Diversity Score (IDDS) is a simple, rapid count of the number of distinct food groups an individual consumed over the previous 24 hours, used as a population-level proxy for diet quality and micronutrient adequacy. Standardized in the FAO's 2011 Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity by Kennedy, Ballard and Dop, the IDDS rests on the observation, reviewed by Ruel, that more diverse diets tend to be more nutritionally adequate. The score is obtained from a qualitative recall of everything eaten, mapping foods to a standard set of nine food groups and counting how many groups appear. Because it requires no portion weighing or food-composition tables, it is cheap to collect at scale and has become a workhorse indicator in nutrition surveys, food-security monitoring, and program evaluation.