Where’s the Food? Part Two: Food Retailer Distribution Rates
This blog is part two of our Where’s the Food series. Our last blog, Where’s the Food? Part One: Finding and Using Data on Specific Food Retailer Locations discussed SparkMap’s USDA data on supermarket and farmer’s market locations. Now we’re shifting the focus to finding and utilizing data on food distribution rates. We will discuss:
- Reasons to Use Food Retailer Distribution Data
- Ways to Find Food Retailer Distribution Data on SparkMap
- Methods for Exploring Food Retailer Distribution Data
Reasons to Use Food Retailer Distribution Data
Whether you work in healthcare, community planning, or food and agriculture, an understanding of food retailer distribution data in your area is crucial. Combined with data on food retailer locations, food retailer distribution data helps build a wholistic understanding of access to various types of food in your service area, a critical social determinant of health.1
Finding Food Retailer Data in SparkMap
Looking to gain a better understanding of food retailer availability in your service area? You can find relevant data in both SparkMap’s Community Needs Assessment and Map Room.
In the Community Needs Assessment, any SparkMap visitor can access the following indicators: Food Environment – Fast Food Restaurants and Food Environment – Grocery Stores. Sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Pattern (CBP) series, these indicators include data on the number of fast food establishments and grocery stores within a given service area, as well as fast food establishment and grocery store distribution rates. Add these indicators to your next Community Needs Assessment to ensure you are taking food distribution rate into account as you gauge your community’s strengths and areas for improvement.
Looking to explore spatial representations of food distribution rates? Check out food provider distribution data in the Map Room. The Map Room contains the following data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Pattern (CBP) series:
- Convenience Stores (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
- Grocery Stores and Supermarkets (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
- Warehouse Clubs and Supercenters (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
- Fruit and Vegetable Markets (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
- Specialty Food Stores (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
- Full Service Restaurants (Rate per 1000,000 pop) by County
- Fast Food Restaurants (Rate per 100,000 pop) by County
Note that due to thorough collection and verification processes, the annual CBP data report provides data from two years prior. The 2022 CBP release thus contains data on food providers in 2020. These data are still quite useful as a means of gauging the distribution of food retailers, as they provide baseline ratios, which you can then supplement with your even more up-to-date and nuanced local knowledge.
Methods for Exploring Food Retailer Distribution Data
Available at the County and ZIP-code level, the CBP Food Retailer data shows the rate of food retailers per 100,000 people. To better understand how this works, let’s head to the Map Room and look at a particular layer, Grocery Stores and Supermarkets, 2020, in Fulton County, GA.
When we click on Fulton County in the Map Room, a popup informs us that the county has 176 grocery stores and a rate of 16.4 grocery stores per 100,000 residents. However, these grocery stores might not be evenly distributed throughout the county. This becomes evident when we change our map’s geography to ZCTA.
In the Fulton County ZIP code 30341, there is a rate of 48.59 grocery stores for every 100,000 residents, whereas in the Fulton County ZIP code 30309 ZIP code, the rate is only 12 grocery stores for every 100,000 residents.
Try exploring these layers in your community at both the county and ZIP-code level to better identify areas in which the ratios of food retailers to population size are quite small. In doing so, you can begin to better target areas easily subject to food shortages caused by retailer inaccessibility.
Conclusion
In this installment of our Where’s the Food series, we discussed Food Retailer Distribution data and its importance to food access within communities. In part three, we will dive further into food accessibility by focusing on SNAP and Food Desert data. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for alerts on when Part Three goes live.
