Apples and Oranges? Classifying Food Retailers in a Midwestern US City Based on the Availability of Fresh Produce

Classifying food retailers is an important step in spatial analyses of food environments for public health research, but current classification methods would benefit from refinement. We classified 94 retailers in Lansing, Michigan, based on the availability of 446 produce items. We compare our classification to groupings based on physical characteristics of stores, which provide indirect information on food availability and are widely used to classify food retailers. We found some justification for 3 commonly used categories (supermarket, grocer, and convenience store). However, additional categories of ethnic food specialist and organic specialist grocers are necessary to summarize variation in food availability, which correlates weakly with physical characteristics of stores.