Perceived food access reveals barriers beyond store proximity
Population-level measures of perceived food access reveal barriers beyond geographic proximity
Computation and Language
Summary
Measuring how easy it is for people to get food usually looks at how close stores are, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The authors used thousands of online reviews to understand five different ways people think about food access, like whether food is affordable or if the store feels welcoming. They found that even stores close to each other can feel very different to shoppers depending on the neighborhood and store experience. This means that looking at just the location of stores misses important parts of how people experience getting food.
What this means in practice
- •For urban planners: Identify neighborhoods where residents face food access barriers beyond distance using online review analysis.
- •For grocery retail managers: Detect and address location-specific customer perceptions of food access to improve store appeal in local communities.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
Teresa Groton, Benjamin rachunok
Abstract
Food access is multidimensional, but population-level measurement still relies heavily on geography because perceived dimensions of access are difficult to measure at scale. Here, we use 25,125 Google Maps reviews from 49 grocery stores in Raleigh, North Carolina, to measure five dimensions of food access: availability, accessibility, affordability, accommodation, and acceptability. We identify review topics with unsupervised topic modeling and assign them to access dimensions using zero-shot classification, with 85.4% agreement against manual coding. The resulting store-level measures capture distinct aspects of food access and reveal barriers that geographic proximity alone does not capture. Comparisons between nearby stores in the same chain further show that identical store policies can be perceived very differently across locations, consistent with food access reflecting the fit between residents and their food environment. Perceived food access also follows systematic socioeconomic and demographic patterns that broadly parallel, but do not replicate, those observed for geographic access. These results show that online grocery reviews can provide a scalable complement to geographic measures of food access.