The Food Retail Landscape Across Rural America

In this report, we examine the landscape of food retailers across the contiguous United States, with a focus on rural America and grocery stores. Changes in food retailers have raised concerns about food access and have led Federal policymakers to introduce several pieces of legislation to improve access to healthy foods, such as the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. We use the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) dataset to create a more complete picture of food retailers, while using store-level information to examine sales and employment, and to distinguish between national, regional, and local chains and single location stores. We find that in rural and urban nonmetro counties, grocery stores outnumbered other forms of food retailers, but that grocery stores declined from 1990 to 2015 while dollar stores and supercenters increased steadily. We also found that although single location grocery stores outnumbered chains in 2015, they have been decreasing throughout this period, resulting in single location grocery stores as a share of food retailers decreasing from 87 to 82 percent.