The Science Behind Your Food Choices

Food and Place | Does Where You Live Influence Your Eating Habits

Where food is sold is not decided randomly, and many factors go into determining where you can buy certain foods. But have you ever considered what goes into making those decisions and what consequences they can have on our own behaviors? Find out how the positioning of food outlets The availability of grocery stores, farmers' markets, and fast-food outlets in your area directly impacts the types of food you consume, with limited access often leading to reliance on processed or convenience foods can affect our health and society as a whole.

Food outlets are all around us, and not one of them is located where it is by accident. From the smallest street vendor to the largest supermarket, every business selling food is doing so with a simple goal in mind – to be successful. To be successful, you need to be prepared. Knowing your customer and more crucially, knowing how to reach your customer, is everything to the success of any business. This is no different in the food sector. However, food is a little different from other products out there.

Understanding food environments

According to the European Public Health Alliance, food environments are the physical, economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts in which people interact with the food system to make decisions about acquiring, preparing, and consuming food.

Each one of those contexts is complex and has many layers, and it is these complexities that businesses, academics, and governments The cultural norms and traditions of the region where you live shape your dietary preferences, as local cuisines and cooking styles become ingrained in daily eating habits. alike are eager to understand.

Most crucially, however, is understanding that deciding on the best place to set up shop for businesses goes far beyond the shop space itself. Sure, a food outlet must be attractive and near to people, but it must also be near its target customers for the business to thrive. Business owners also need to consider the movement and behavior of people - from local population density and footfall to transport links and seasonal trends in potential customer preferences.

If people are to make purchases, they need ease of access to what they want and what they can afford. If you're a small business, this information can be crucial to setting up a shop successfully, especially as you can only really do it once. And for those businesses who can afford it, the prospect of using marketing models in location strategy can become a tantalizing prospect. Not only can it give retailers a better understanding of their customers' movements and needs, but it can also offer insight into their competitors' likely next steps.

But what happens when you're big enough to open enough stores that you can test your own data? Successful supermarkets and fast food chains can have hundreds, if not thousands, of outlets globally, and with that rich amount of data, they can dig even deeper into what sells and where. That data can range from supermarket features, such as visibility and ease of access, to characteristics of the area itself, such as demographic makeup and competitor growth. Success breeds success, and big businesses have the money and the analytical know-how to determine the optimum sites to set up shop, knowing what is most profitable to them by square foot.

The Wild West of food location

The world is a diverse place, and large food companies are better equipped than ever with a multitude of tactics and tools at their disposal to capitalize on any openings in the market. From lobbying groups that could sway policy to new technologies and legal expertise, these tools give large food companies the ability to venture out globally The cost of living in your area, including food prices, can dictate what and how much you eat, with higher costs potentially limiting access to healthy options for some individuals. if they want to expand or if a current market they exist in isn't going in their favor.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are prime examples of this. The message that sugary products can contribute to obesity is starting to take a foothold in many of the countries where these companies have traditionally possessed stable and lucrative markets, including the country where they were both founded, the US.

McDonald's has also made shifts globally to respond to gaps in the market. Almost uniquely, the fast food outlet can pick practically any location in the world due to its huge global brand. Still, its success after entering the food environments of other continents has been down to its integration into the cultures surrounding them, much like Coca-Cola. McDonald's may keep hold of certain items wherever it goes to retain core parts of its brand, such as the McFlurry and Happy Meals, but it will localize its approach depending on the country or region. For example, McDonald's sells the Teritama Burger on the spring menu and the Tsukimi Burger on the Japanese autumn menu. In contrast, it will sell the McSpicy Paneer in India - targeting regional The lifestyle and social environment of your location—such as urban versus rural settings—can encourage or discourage certain eating habits, like dining out frequently in cities or relying on home-cooked meals in rural areas and seasonal preferences.

In Mexico, the consumption of carbonated soft drinks is among the highest in the world. Contributing factors include the hot climate, relentless marketing, and the fact that people at all income levels drink soda.

The consequence of movement

Even when policies and laws explicitly curb big business, competition for success usually finds a way. For example, when the Sunday Trading Act 1994 was passed in the UK, businesses were legally allowed to start trading on Sundays, but with the proviso that if the outlet was over 3,000 square feet, aka a large store, it could only trade for 6 hours in the day.

In principle, this would bring some equity across the market as it allows the smaller independent outlets a few less competitive hours in the week. Many bigger businesses also bought and moved to bigger stores outside of the inner cities and had seemingly no means of accessing this new market. However, this shift in legislation simply birthed the rise of the big business mini-mart – Sainsbury's opened 'Sainsbury's Local' stores, Tesco launched 'Tesco Express' to name but a few, and it was done with the express intention of using those laws to re-enter cities and regain access to those markets.

However, there are knock-on effects of this constant race to success. On a microscopic level, the success of a business – benefiting its employees and contributing to economic growth – is, of course, a good thing. But, if this is mismanaged on a macroscopic level, even if the food sold is healthy, it can have severe effects.

When a supermarket moves into an area, it can push smaller businesses out using prices they can't compete with, leaving the local community dependent on the large outlet for their food instead. And it's not only the prices that smaller businesses can't compete with. Larger outlets can test the success rate of the location of goods within a store, too, tactically moving and presenting certain products to achieve the optimum selling result. Although a food producer rather than a food outlet, Dole Plc. is a perfect example of this meticulous attention to detail only large companies can afford. Dole is one of the largest producers of fruit and vegetables in the world, and they have honed the precise color of bestselling bananas down to a science, calculating that Pantone color 12-0752 (Buttercup) sells more than the slightly brighter Pantone color 13-0858 (Vibrant Yellow).

This attention to detail and price lowering might seem great to the consumer, but it can all change if a supermarket pulls the plug on a certain location. If an area becomes less lucrative or a supermarket The prevalence of food marketing in your local environment, such as billboards and store promotions, can influence your food choices by encouraging the consumption of certain products over others, often favoring less healthy options. has intel on a potentially better location, nothing stops an exodus that removes that food option from the consumer.

When supermarkets move into an area, they often push out smaller grocery shops. If that supermarket subsequently closes, this contributes to the development of food deserts: unreliable access to affordable and nutritious food.

Bias and discrimination

The most concerning consequence of limited access to local food is what happens to the people whose choice is taken away. Food deserts aren't just formed by large food outlets leaving an area; they can also be formed by such outlets never wanting to enter an area in the first place. 'Supermarket redlining' is where such businesses leave or avoid areas they have calculated as too high a risk in urban and low-income areas to be a success, instead going to more affluent suburban areas. The top line reasoning can be lower overheads and reduced crime risk, but the bottom line is that such avoidance can deprive many of the people who need most of the convenient and accessible fresh food in their local area, having severe knock-on effects on health.

Studies show that poor nutrition can affect concentration and cognitive performance. When considering the effect this can have on schools in these areas, the negative consequences of food deserts can create a vicious cycle.

Regulating food and place

These complications with food and place aren't going unnoticed. Governments, academics, and medical experts alike are making concerted efforts to try to combat the effects of these geographical shifts. They, too, are using data to pinpoint trends in food environments, but rather than being profit-driven, they are using it in an attempt to combat obesity and poor nutrition. The marketing and food pricing used in conjunction with location is one key area of focus, as well as bills and policies, passed to encourage businesses to help diversify their offerings and support consumers to shift away from the unhealthy stores they're susceptible to visiting.

Governments don't usually go as far as banning certain stores outright from a country, not just for potential legal reasons, but because another store can just as easily swoop in and take that fallen outlet's space. Instead, administrations must take a more targeted, calculated approach.

In 2017, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced fast food outlets would not be allowed to open within 400m of schools.

The reason was to restore a healthy balance in the food environments of the UK's capital. Cheap, easy access to meals containing high levels of calories, fat, salt, and sugar is appealing to children in any setting, but London was seeing a steady rise in stores selling such meals, to the point that certain deprived areas had the highest density of fast food outlets in England.

Bailouts and funding can also contribute to restoring balance in food environments. In Birmingham, US, food deserts are so abundant that an estimated two-thirds of the population does not have easy, affordable access to fresh food. Following the bankruptcy of supermarket Winn-Dixie, the local government acted to combat the downward trend by providing an incentive package of $640k to Food Giant supermarket to set up there afterward. This $640k is part of a $2m store recruitment fund helping to combat unhealthy food environments found in the city.

Combining both policy change and subsidies can help deprived food environments even more, with transport being a key factor in this. Administrations can maximize their public transport links and the scheduling of transport for deprived areas when transport infrastructure is strong.

But at the other end of the spectrum, governments must also consider the transport logistics when getting to remote, isolated areas, and the freight costs associated with transporting food once the route is resolved, especially when it comes to fresh and healthy produce. These extra costs can easily fall onto these small, isolated communities, but governments can curb this with policies that allow for subsidies to match these extra transport costs, taking some of this financial burden away from these communities.

In isolated communities, the logistical challenges of supplying these areas may restrict food affordability and quality. Providing subsidies and improving transport networks can take some of the financial burden away from these communities, thus improving food choices and food security.

Keeping the free market free

However, making such changes isn't easy. It took the London Plan 2021 for Khan's initiative to pass, four years after his announcement in 2017. Endemic food deserts are difficult to fight, even when lucrative incentive deals are set up to counter them. And one simple, major reason for these difficulties is that you can't simply tell people what to do. People have the right to eat what they want regardless of the health connotations, and it can become tricky when you start telling an individual how to run their business. If a food outlet is small, you could be running them out of business, if they are large, they will use all their power to prevent their success from being stifled. It's human nature, so striking that balance is key to keeping the positives from both sides of the argument in play.

The digital marketplace

Despite all this, the definition of place shifts as technology develops. After COVID-19, more consumers have become comfortable ordering food online, with over a third of consumers now preferring to do their groceries online, redefining the whole premise of the store.

Defensive mechanisms are already in use against those digital 'spaces' perceived to go too far. Grocery apps also exploded during the lockdown, creating 'dark stores'—unused buildings in the heart of cities to ensure rapid delivery. Complaints and pushback against noise and disruption have already resulted in their growth shrinking in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where such 'stores' are now officially banned.

Future progress will always be made, and whether it's successful or not, the ambition and drive behind it will always be there. This can be a good thing, as long as the impetus to understand physical and digital food environments pushes on, too. It is up to governments and businesses alike to keep both the economy and society healthy. So long as growth is overseen responsibly, there's no reason why it can't be.