Mapping Grocery Store Food Environments: New Tool Sheds Light on Equity Gaps

In a world where food insecurity and diabetes rates rise among First Nations communities, a Canadian researcher has devised a tool to decode the hidden dynamics of grocery stores—where healthy and unhealthy food choices quietly collide.

The Food Environment Assessment Tool in Store (FEAT-S), developed by Fabrice Mobetty under the supervision of Professors Geneviève Mercille and Malek Batal at Université de Montréal, evaluates grocery store environments across six dimensions: availability, price, quality, variety, shelf space, and promotion.

This framework expands on the National Nutritious Food Basket by including 70 products (57 nutritious and 13 ultra-processed) to reflect real-world purchasing patterns.

Validation of FEAT-S occurred in Montreal and Kanesatake, achieving a high content validity index of 0.92 from nine food environment experts. The tool’s community-centric design emphasizes collaboration with local populations to interpret observations meaningfully. Fabrice Mobetty said:

"The goal was to develop a more robust tool to describe food retail environments and assess the interactions between food availability in a community and health problems in the population."

Preliminary findings reveal variable pricing in remote communities. In one location, all 13 ultra-processed foods were more expensive inside the village than outside. Geneviève Mercille emphasized the collaborative nature of the work:

"When we measure the food retail environment, we don't do it alone. It isn't done in a vacuum. The observations have to be interpreted together with the community."

The study does not provide clinical guidance but aims to generate data for public policy improvements. Correlation between food environments and health outcomes is highlighted, though causation cannot be established from this research.

Findings remain preliminary and require further validation before clinical application.

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