The Geography of Groceries

On a rainy afternoon in Vancouver, Canada’s Sunset neighborhood, grocery shopping can mean something very different than it does just a few miles away. While residents in wealthier areas like Kitsilano can choose from multiple supermarkets within a short walk, families in Sunset or Oakridge often face a longer, more complicated trip—sometimes two bus rides—to reach a store with affordable, fresh produce.

This uneven geography of access isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a matter of health and equity. Ensuring residents can easily walk or roll to a grocery store from home is an important piece of Vancouver’s city-wide vision. As part of the City of Vancouver’s Healthy City Strategy, the city is also committed to improving equitable access to healthy, affordable food.

With a vision for a more equitable food system in mind, in 2024/2025, the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Coastal Health (the region’s health authority) looked at how the location of grocery stores and fresh food markets can influence health and diet-related diseases.

The new Equitable Access to Healthy Food Retail report makes one thing clear: healthy eating depends on more than personal choice—it depends on many structural factors, including physical access to food retail that offers nutritious food options like fresh produce, whole grains, and lean proteins.

Food insecurity, either due to inadequate income or lack of access to grocery stores, can increase the risk of chronic diseases. Increasing access to healthy food retail can encourage healthy eating and improve livability.

Vancouver’s food insecurity landscape mirrors national trends. Across Canada, food insecurity disproportionately affects people on low incomes, renters, single mothers, people with disabilities, and Black and Indigenous communities. Locally, these geographic disparities can be striking: in Sunset, 43% of residents reported being food insecure in 2023, compared with just 10% in Kitsilano1.

Food retailers, meanwhile, tend to locate in places where they are allowed by zoning and where they may be the most profitable—not necessarily where they’re most needed. For people who walk, cycle, or rely on public transit—especially seniors or those with mobility challenges—this creates significant barriers to food access.

To visualize these inequities, the City of Vancouver mapped its food retail environment using two key indicators:

• Geographic access—the distance and time it takes to walk to a grocery store selling fresh produce.

• Median income—with attention to areas where earnings fall below $35,000 CAD—Vancouver's living wage in 2019.

By layering these data sets, the team identified Food Retail Priority Zones—neighborhoods where residents are more likely to have both lower incomes and limited access to grocery stores. While chronic diseases have many causes, health data showed that many of the priority food retail areas were also places with higher rates of diabetes and heart disease.

Addressing these inequities means rethinking how cities plan, zone and support food retail. The report recommends a mix of policy and partnership solutions to ensure that every resident can reach affordable, nutritious food within walking distance.

They include:

• Zoning reforms to enable grocery and market spaces in more neighborhoods.

• Incentives for grocers to open in underserved areas.

• Support for non-profit food retail storefronts or temporary markets to land healthy and affordable options where the market isn’t supplying them.

• Closer collaboration between public health and city planning, ensuring health data informs land-use decisions.

Community-based food programs—gardens, mobile markets, and meal initiatives—already help fill short-term gaps. But the report emphasizes that these can’t replace structural solutions. Equitable access must be designed into the city’s growth and development plans.

As cities worldwide grapple with rising inequality and cost of living, Vancouver’s approach lays the groundwork for a model that integrates health, equity, and urban planning. Supported by the Partnership for Healthy Cities, the project aligns with a growing global movement to prevent noncommunicable diseases—like diabetes and heart disease—through local action.

Ultimately, equitable access to healthy food isn’t just about adding more grocery stores. It’s about creating communities where income, mobility, or postal code don’t determine who gets to eat well and live well.

Vancouver’s data-driven approach is a powerful first step toward that vision: a roadmap for how cities can turn evidence into action, and equity into everyday reality.

Read the full report: Equitable Access to Healthy Food Access here