The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI)®
Accelerating global food and health evidence, discovery, and innovation to improve food quality and nourish the world.
The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI)®
Accelerating global food and health evidence, discovery, and innovation to improve food quality and nourish the world.
PTFI is an affiliate of RFCC and helped in its initial launch and partnership model.
Initiative Impact
Building the scientific evidence base of food quality to improve human and planetary health.
The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI)® is working to shift the global ambition from feeding the world to nourishing the world. This means going beyond yields, calories, and basic nutrients to consider food quality. Poor diets and diet-related diseases affect billions of people and impose trillions of dollars in health and economic costs globally. Yet we still lack comprehensive knowledge of how food quality is shaped across food systems and affects human health at the molecular level. Closing this knowledge gap is essential to better managing food quality from production to consumption and developing innovations that nourish people and the planet.
To advance this ambition, PTFI is building a global Molecular Commons to generate and translate high-resolution evidence on food quality and its relationship to human health at an unprecedented depth and scale. This shared infrastructure accelerates scientific discovery, better decision-making, and innovation across food systems.
OUR MISSION is to engage global partners to generate, translate, and apply high-resolution evidence on food quality and health to nourish the world.
OUR VISION is a world where everyone is nourished by thriving food systems.
OUR THEORY OF CHANGE is that by making food quality measurable and comparable at scale, and leveraging this evidence with AI, we can enable better decisions and innovations across food systems to nourish people and the planet.
The power of PTFI is partnership. Our expanding global ecosystem includes 9 Centers of Excellence and 40+ collaborating institutions, including national laboratories, universities, research institutions, enterprises across 20+ countries. The PTFI is managed under a co-secretariat between the American Heart Association and the Alliance of Biodiversity International CIAT.
Video Spotlight
The Food Intelligence Economy: What’s Really in Our Food
PTFI’s vision: build the world’s most comprehensive enabling platform for understanding what’s in our food, and let the entire world use it. A global ecosystem where scientists and researchers exchange knowledge every day, unlocking innovations we might never have discovered otherwise. Paired with AI as a decision-support tool, that knowledge becomes actionable — new formulations, new processing approaches, and new products that are commercially successful, nutritious and affordable. Explore the food intelligence economy in their newest video.
Across the PTFI ecosystem, high-resolution evidence is revealing how food quality varies, what shapes it, and its impacts on human health. This evidence is demonstrating how food quality can become a measurable and actionable metric for managing food systems and driving innovation from production to consumption to health.
- Regenerative Agriculture: Breeding and Managing for Food Quality. PTFI research is revealing differences in food composition associated with agricultural practices, growing conditions, geography, and production systems.
- Edible Biodiversity: Making the Unknown, Knowable. PTFI data is uncovering enormous molecular diversity within and across foods that conventional composition databases do not capture.
- Nourishing Food and Meals: Optimizing What People Eat. PTFI is testing how molecular evidence can improve the design and evaluation of real-world food interventions while accounting for nutrition, sustainability, sourcing, taste, cultural relevance, procurement and cost.
- Food Quality to Human Health: Understanding What Matters for Health. PTFI is building an evidence chain from production → food composition → intake → digestion and microbial transformation → human exposure → biological response → health.
Explore PTFI food molecular data via MarkerLab→
In Their Words
I aim to use my platform to help bridge the nutrition gap and to get everyone excited to eat sustainable foods.
PTFI Ambassador
