The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has a role in promoting and co-ordinating the development of uniform risk assessment methodologies. Exposure assessment is a crucial and integral part of risk assessment and the quality of available data both on food consumption and on occurrence levels may have a major impact on the outcome of risk assessment. For European exposure assessment it is important to make use of existing national data that is somewhat comparable at European level. At present however there is a lack of internationally comparable data on food consumption. The ultimate aim is to have harmonised food consumption data collected and available in the future.