Iron Viz - Food Fight! Exploring the international trade of fruits and vegetables

The latest Iron Viz qualifier recently finished with the topic of 'Food Fight!' The winning design was by Russell Spangler and you can find all the entries here.

Unfortunately for me it was another fruitless Tableau Public competition (pun intended) but I'm still very happy with my entry. I try to abide by the 'Keep it Simple Stupid' approach, which Chris Love has so nicely vocalised with his #TableauKISS campaign, by combining accessibility and fun with depth and functionality.

The dashboard is designed to encourage interaction and to let you explore imports and exports by country and by produce type. Please click around the lower half of the viz to see what happens!

I hope you enjoy navigating the data and find some interesting trade patterns or learn something about where the food on your supermarket shelf comes from. 'Food miles' are a pretty hot topic these days, and I don't think we always appreciate the global network of growers and distributors that bring us our food. And of course feel free to download it to see what's going on under the bonnet.

The data was sourced from http://faostat.fao.org/ and includes all the latest import and export volumes across some 46 different fruits and vegetables and 211 countries. With all combinations this comes to almost 90,000 separate data points and my intention was to essentially follow the Tableau mission to help people see and understand the data.

Here's my entry - The Global Grocer