Food purchasing patterns across retailers and geography

This project will analyse how food purchasing patterns vary across different retailers and geographic areas in Great Britain.

Background

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Understanding how food purchasing patterns vary across retailers and locations is important for designing effective food and health policies. The healthiness of purchases differs across supermarket chains and across geographic areas, but these differences may arise from both supply-side factors (such as product range, pricing, and promotions) and demand-side factors (such as consumer preferences and constraints). 

Policies aimed at improving diet through sales-based targets for retails depends critically on the extent to which observed differences in purchasing healthiness reflect retailer behaviour rather than the composition of their consumer base. Understanding these mechanisms is therefore key to assessing both the effectiveness and distributional impacts of such policies. 

Aims and Objectives

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The aim of this project is to examine variation in the healthiness of food purchases across retailers and geographic areas, and to assess the role of consumer composition in explaining these differences. The objectives are:
1. To document differences in the healthiness of food purcahses across major retailers using multiple measures (expenditure, quantity, calories, and nutrient profiling scores)
2. To examine how purchasing healthniess varies across regions and levels of deprivation
3. To assess the extent to which differences across retailers can be explained by observable characteristics of their customers.

Methodology

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We use household-level scanner data from the Worldpanel by Numerator Take Home Panel to analyse purchases of food and non-alcoholic beverages for in-home consumption. We construct measures of purchasing healthiness based on the Nutrient Profiling Model (NPM), including both binary classifications of products and continuous nutrient profiling scores.

We document variation in purchasing healthiness across retailers, regions, and socioeconomic groups, and examine how these patterns differ across alternative weighting schemes (expenditure, quantity, and calories). We also explore the role of promotional activity in shaping purchasing patterns. 

Finally, we use regression-based decomposition methods to quantify the extent to which cross-retailer differences in purchasing healthiness are explained by differences in the observable characteristics of households. 

Timing 

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• This project will run from January 2024 to January 2026

Led by Britta Augsburg at the Institute of Fiscal Studies. View the Healthy Weight research team 

 

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The NIHR Policy Research Unit in Healthy Weight is part of the NIHR and hosted by UCL.