Accessibility and Availability of Food Store in Urban Area of Korea

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Food stores are known to play an important role in food choice of people and thus may also be critical determinants for their nutrition and health status. The aim of this research was to assess accessibility and availability of food store in a city. A total of 73 food stores, including 13 chain supermarkets, 17 non‐chain supermarkets, 17 convenience stores, 9 marketplaces (including farmer's market, street market from truck), and 17 specialty stores (butcher's, organic or produce shop) were recruited from the list of telephone directory and search engine between 2013 and 2014 in urban area of Hwaseong‐si, Korea. A structured questionnaire previously developed was applied to collect information on general characteristics and accessibility of food store and availability of selling products. The store size of chain supermarket was predominantly bigger than other food stores (p<0.01), and the majority of the customers in food store were female except non‐chain supermarket and convenience store. The age group of major customers were 30–40' in supermarkets, 40–50's in marketplace and specialty store, and 20–30's in convenience store.. The ‘best‐selling product’ in the chain supermarket were unprocessed food such as vegetables, fruits, meats and milk, but ‘ready‐to‐eat products’ like beverages, milk, snack and noodles were highly ranked in other type of food stores. All food stores showed high accessibility to parking lot (82~100%) as well as to public transportation (78~100%), but chain supermarket and specialty store had the easiest accessibility with home delivery as well as convenient order system by phone and internet. Healthy food options such as whole or mixed grain, low/no sodium, low fat, low calorie products were widely available in the chain supermarket, while was mostly limited in convenience stores. However, over half of convenience stores were available for low fat milk, low calorie noodle and soda. Chain supermarket offers the greatest variety in vegetables and fruits, but convenience store, marketplace and specialty store do considerably lower diversity of produce (p<0.001). This study showed that accessibility and availability of food stores are different from store type in urban area. Further researches to evaluate food stores in other areas are required to develop food environment intervention programs.Support or Funding InformationThis work was supported by the ‘Development of Agriculture Science Technology’ projected from the Rural Development Administration (PJ008995).