Are food and drink available in online and physical supermarkets the same? A comparison of product availability, price, price promotions and nutritional information.

Objective: Online supermarkets are increasingly used both by consumers and as a source of data on the food environment. We compared product availability, nutritional information, front-of-pack (FOP) labelling, price and price promotions for food and drink products between physical and online supermarkets.

Design: For physical stores, we collected data on price, price promotions, FOP nutrition labels and nutrition information from a random sample of food and drinks from six UK supermarkets.

Impact of the announcement and implementation of the UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy on sugar content, price, product size and number of available soft drinks in the UK, 2015-19: A controlled interrupted time series analysis.

Background: Dietary sugar, especially in liquid form, increases risk of dental caries, adiposity, and type 2 diabetes. The United Kingdom Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) was announced in March 2016 and implemented in April 2018 and charges manufacturers and importers at £0.24 per litre for drinks with over 8 g sugar per 100 mL (high levy category), £0.

Nutrient composition databases in the age of big data: foodDB, a comprehensive, real-time database infrastructure.

Objectives: Traditional methods for creating food composition tables struggle to cope with the large number of products and the rapid pace of change in the food and drink marketplace. This paper introduces foodDB, a big data approach to the analysis of this marketplace, and presents analyses illustrating its research potential.

Design: foodDB has been used to collect data weekly on all foods and drinks available on six major UK supermarket websites since November 2017.

The use of commercial food purchase data for public health nutrition research: A systematic review.

Background: Traditional methods of dietary assessment have their limitations and commercial sources of food sales and purchase data are increasingly suggested as an additional source to measuring diet at the population level. However, the potential uses of food sales data are less well understood. The aim of this review is to establish how sales data on food and soft drink products from third-party companies have been used in public health nutrition research.