The Food environment assessment tool (Feat) was created by researchers and research support staff from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, at the University of Cambridge, UK. The scientific lead on Feat is Thomas Burgoine. Read more about why Feat was created here.
The development of initial versions of Feat was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through their Impact Acceleration Account (IAA). A later version was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Public Health Research (SPHR). Feat is currently funded in-kind by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit. The Feat development team are grateful to these funders for their support.
Feat uses data collected by local authorities that has been demonstrated to be some of the most accurate and complete publicly-available food outlet location data in the UK. However, we cannot be held responsible for any inaccuracies.
To contact the Feat development team, email feat-tool@mrc-epid.cam.ac.uk
Feat is underpinned by food outlet locations from the Food Standards Agency's Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) data. FHRS data contains information on food outlets submitted regularly by local authorities, who collect this data to facilitate food hygiene inspections. It is one of the most complete secondary sources of food outlet data in England.
The locations of takeaways and supermarkets are available to explore in Feat. Each of these food outlet types is based on a grouping of FSA FHRS use codes, assigned by local authorities, as follows:
Major national chain supermarkets, both small- and large-format stores, operated by Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons Aldi, Lidl, The Co-operative, Waitrose and Iceland.
Identified using a method developed by Public Health England. Briefly, takeaways were “takeaway/sandwich shop” (include fully), “retailers - other”, “retailers - supermarkets/hypermarkets”, “school/college/university” (include eight major fast food chains only), and “restaurant/café/canteen”, “other catering premises” (include eight major chains and via nine key search terms only) “other catering premises”, “restaurant/café/canteen”. Key search terms used were “burger”, “chicken”, “chip”, “fish bar”, “pizza”, “kebab”, “india”, “china”, “Chinese”.
In order to allow standardisation of food outlet counts by resident population, we used mid-2021 usual resident population data from the Office for National Statistics (County level, Ward level), available here.
Feat displays food access data at six geographic levels: Country, Local Authority (LA), middle super output area (MSOA), Ward, and lower super output area (LSOA). 2011 Country, Local Authority, MSOA, and LSOA boundaries were downloaded from UKBORDERS.
FSA FHRS data contain full address data including postcode. These supplied postcodes were mapped to their respective geographic boundaries using the National Statistics Postcode Lookup (NSPL). Food outlet access in Feat is calculated as the number of food outlets present per geographic boundary.