Calculating Selling Area for Healthy Retail

Access to stores and markets offer healthy food is vital to the health of any community, but low-income communities and communities of color suffer disproportionately from inequitable access to quality, nutritious food.

Recognizing this, government officials, advocates and other stakeholders have been working across the United States to bring produce and staple foods to small corner stores and convenience stores that serve the hardest-hit communities.

Several of the healthy food retail programs operating across the country require stores to devote a certain percentage of “selling area” to produce and staple foods, and a similar requirement can be incorporated into a policy as a required condition. Calculating and measuring “selling area” is not an easy task, however.

ChangeLab Solutions developed Calculating Selling Area for Healthy Retail to explain how to measure the total selling area of a store, both floor area and shelf space, as well as calculating the total percentage of selling area devoted to a particular type of product like produce or staple foods.