Retail Assessment 2025
This research assesses the strategies and performance of the top three retailers in six selected countries with varying income levels in improving access to and the affordability of healthier foods, and evaluates policies aimed at strengthening their role in supporting healthier food environments.
Research Context
Food retailers are playing an increasingly dominant role in shaping food environments across high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Their growing presence influences what foods are available, affordable, and promoted, often favouring energy-dense products high in added sugars, fats, and salt, while healthy and nutrient-rich foods remain less prominent or accessible.
This shift is contributing to changing dietary patterns and rising rates of obesity and non-communicable diseases, alongside persistent undernutrition in many settings. Assessing how retailers affect the food environment is critical to advancing policies that foster healthier, more sustainable diets.
ATNi’s 2025 research project aims to map and analyze the strategies, policies, targets, and performance of food retailers across six countries with varying income levels. By evaluating how retailers influence access and affordability of healthier foods, the assessment seeks to identify effective interventions, investments, and policy opportunities to create healthier food environments for all.
Building on 13 years of ATNi’s market-shaping and benchmarking work — including the Global and Country Indexes and the UK 2022 Retailer Index — this project will assess leading retailers in the USA, France, South Africa, Indonesia, Kenya, and the Philippines.
Research Components
Retail Environment Mapping
Analyze retail market structures, types of food retailers, geographical distribution of retailers, consumer reach, and food retail trends in each of the selected countries, based on literature review and key informant interviews.
Retailer Strategies & Performance
Assess the corporate policies and commitments, and analyze promotional practices and healthiness of private label products (according to local and international government-endorsed Nutrient Profile Models and levels of processing) for the top three retailers per country.
Pricing & Affordability
Compare the affordability of healthier vs. less healthy products, in relation to income levels, purchasing power parity, and other economic indicators per country.
Policy & Regulatory Gaps
Map current policies and identify gaps and best practices to incentivize retailers to strengthen their role in supporting healthier food environments.
Impact Drivers
- Comprehensive mapping of retail environments and strategies influencing nutrition.
- Enhanced transparency and accountability in the food retail sector.
- Evidence-based recommendations for retailers, institutional investors, and policymakers to improve access and affordability of healthier foods.
Food Retail Accountability
By providing retailers, investors, and policymakers with actionable insights, this project drives systemic change – helping the food retail sector and other actors to prioritize health, transparency, and affordability. By generating cross-country data* on how retail strategies impact nutrition access, especially in lower-income settings, it fills key evidence gaps and empowers better decisions for healthier, more sustainable food systems.
The data and analyses generated from this assessment will be placed into ATNi’s new 2024 Dashboard. This dashboard delivers actionable insights on the healthiness of packaged food portfolios through detailed, high-quality data for more than 30 countries worldwide.
Follow our impact
Join us in building a healthier food system for everyone
"*" indicates required fields