It identified the un-employed, people on low incomes, the sick, and people with disabilities as the groups most likely to suffer food poverty.
Other categories also at risk are those with low education attainment, lone parents, and families with more than three children aged under 18.
As part of the research, the agency for promoting food safety, Safefood, has developed a food poverty indicator based on the results of the annual survey by the CSO on income and living conditions.
Food deprivation is measured by experiencing one or more of three criteria: The inability to afford a meal with meat or a vegetarian equivalent every second day, a roast once a week, and missing a meal in the previous fortnight due to a lack of money.
Launching the report, the chairman of the Oireachtas health committee, Jerry Buttimer, said the study represented a major advance in providing a measurement of food poverty in Ireland.
Martin Higgins, Safefood CEO, said the development of a food poverty indicator would allow the issue to be monitored and tracked on an annual basis.
"It will allow for more focused strategies and targeted interventions to tackle diet-related health inequalities in society."
Mr Higgins said previous research had shown that food was often seen by many families as the flexible expense in their household budgets.
Safefood said the concern for many experiencing food poverty was just to "put food on the table" with nutritional content not regarded as a priority.
Safefood’s director of human health and nutrition, Cliodhna Foley-Nolan, said that poor concentration and poor energy levels in children were among the immediate effects of food poverty.
"The longer-term public health consequences for those households living in food poverty are ill health and higher rates of diet-related chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, type-2 diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers," she said.