About the Project and Team

The Global Diet Quality Project began in 2016 with the simple question, “Why don’t we collect data on diets across countries?”

Over the next decade, we developed and tested a robust, replicable methodology for feasible, low-cost diet data collection.

The diet quality questionnaire (“DQQ”) was adapted for each country, through an inclusive process involving 1,000 key informants in 140 countries, whilst adhering to the global guidance documents for data collection published by FAO, WHO, and UNICEF.

By 2025, this investment resulted in a new indicator in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD). The DQQ has been implemented in over 100 nationally-representative surveys since 2021 – a revolution in diet data collection.

We encourage national survey planners to include the DQQ module in existing national surveys, such as household budget surveys, for tracking the SDG indicator comparably and consistently over time. It can be administered by generalist enumerators, and the cost is equal to 5 minutes of survey time. Data analysis is automatic.

The DQQ is the most widely-used, proven lowest cost method of gathering MDD data, both for women and children (MDD-W and MDD-C). Additionally, the data can also produce indicators of adherence to national food-based dietary guidelines, dietary risk factors for chronic disease, and infant and young child feeding practices published by WHO and UNICEF. The results from surveys implemented by the Gallup World Poll are displayed on this website.