The need to represent knowledge about food is central to many fields such as health, food safety, nutrition, food allergy, sustainable development, trade, ecosystems etc. Academic, national, provincial and departmental databases are all silos of food terminology and data models. Several resources and standards exist for indexing food descriptors however their content and architecture are not semantically and logically coherent. Here we present a unified approach to developing a Farm-to-Fork food ontology which will facilitate data sharing and interoperability between different health, regulatory, development and research communities worldwide.