Food Market Measures Toolkit: Assessment of Food Environment, Consumers, and Store Owners

The Food Market Measures Toolkit compiles, categorizes, and describes healthy food retail measures to assist researchers and public health practitioners in selecting the appropriate measurement tool for their work. While a majority of measures focus on store environment and availability of healthy food, this guide also includes measures of consumer and store-owner perspectives. In addition, the guide helps identify gaps in healthy food retail measurement tools, which may encourage researchers to pursue developing and testing new measures moving forward.

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January 2013

Developing a Toolkit to Measure Access to Healthy Foods at Urban and Rural Corner Stores

The project seeks to address a measurement gap in food access research by assessing various factors in corner stores within the context of the larger food environment related to childhood obesity prevention. Using mainly qualitative approaches, a toolkit of healthy corner store measures, specific to store owners, parents, and adolescents will be developed. The long-term More

May 2025

Implementation Insights and Equity: Considerations for Summer EBT in 2024

In 2024, the US Department of Agriculture introduced a new federal nutrition initiative, the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) program—also known as SUN Bucks. This program offers grocery benefits to low-income families with children during the summer months to help address gaps in summer food assistance. In 2024, 37 states, all 5 US territories, and More

February 2025

More States and Sponsors Are Providing Grab-and-Go Meals to Children during Summer

In 2023, to respond to increased rates of child food insecurity during the summer Congress authorized states to opt in to allowing noncongregate, or “grab-and-go,” summer meal services for students in rural areas. In the summer of 2023, 46 states and DC opted in, and in the summer of 2024 all 50 states and DC More

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