The food retail landscape in America has been rapidly changing over the past few decades. This has had complex impacts for the competitiveness and healthiness of this industry.
Rigoberto Lopez, professor of agricultural and resource economics in the College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources, has received a Research Excellence Program (REP) grant to develop new knowledge about the evolving food retail landscape. This project will provide necessary research to help make the food shopping options in the U.S. more competitive and healthier for people everywhere.
Since the 90s, the top four food retailers increased their share of total market sales from 16% to 43% at the national level. This transition is correlated with the growth of “dollar stores,” outlets where most items are offered at discounted rates and often provide the only food purchase option in food desserts.
Many of these dollar stores, which stock prepackaged and processed foods rather than fresh produce, tend to pop up in food deserts where people lack access to other, healthier food shopping options. These stores also tend to sell food at a much lower price than other stores, providing significant competition to retailers that may have healthier, but more expensive, options.
Despite the significance of the rapid expansion of dollar stores, no scholarship has examined the impact of the emergence of these types of retailers on obesity and local competition.
Furthermore, online retailers like Amazon.com, which is one of the top 17 U.S. food retailers, provides consumers with another way of buying food, radically altering the landscape of the market. Their importance has increased after the pandemic.
Lopez will lead an interdisciplinary team that includes Sandro Steinbach, assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics; Kristen Cooksey Stowers, assistant professor of allied health sciences, and Debarchana Ghosh, associate professor of geography. The team also includes Quianxia Jiang, a Ph.D. advisee of Cooksey Stowers, to be mentored by the team under this project.
This interdisciplinary approach will advance research on an important question that undoubtedly benefits from having experts in diverse fields at the table. The team will produce data-driven measures of competitiveness to evaluate shifts in market structure and assess how these changes impact obesity and human well-being.
One novel aspect of the project is that it will address how retailers can be affected by their geographic distance and types of grocery store competitors.
The team will utilize the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) information on sales, and the name and exact location of each food retail establishment in the United States for the past three decades. They will then combine this information with sociodemographic data about residents in different areas of the country and identify separate impacts in food deserts.
The researchers will look at health factors likes body mass index (BMI) as well as heart disease, high cholesterol, and type II diabetes to determine the association between the food retail landscape and health outcomes for consumers.
The findings from this study will help guide public policy to improve food supply chain performance, food security, and support people’s access to healthier, more nutritious food options. Ultimately, the REP grant will be leveraged into larger, more comprehensive grants, including one with UPenn’s Wharton School on competition and another on the health component with the UConn team.
The Office of the Vice President for Research REP provides seed funding to fuel innovative research, scholarship, and creative projects.
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