Abstract Background The timely and accurate identification of food insecurity situations represents a challenging issue. Household surveys are routinely used in low-income countries and are an essential tool for obtaining key food security indicators that are used by decision makers to determine the targets of food security interventions. Methodology This paper investigates the spatial and temporal quality of the food security indicators obtained through household surveys. The empirical case of Burkina Faso is used in this paper, where a large-scale rural household survey has been conducted yearly since 2009. From this data set, three food security indicators (the Food Consumption Score, the Household Dietary Diversity Score and the Coping Strategies Index) are calculated at the regional level for each year during the 2009–2017 period. Results Results highlight that observed spatiotemporal variations in these indicators are consistent with the major regional food shocks reported in food warning system reports and are significantly correlated with variations computed from other sources of data, such as satellite images, rainfall and food prices. Conclusion These results raise new research questions on food security monitoring systems and on the use of heterogeneous data and multiple food security indicators.