JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Online food delivery services (OFDS) enable individuals to conveniently access foods from any deliverable location. The increased accessibility to foods may have implications on the consumption of healthful or unhealthful foods. Of concern, previous research suggests that OFDS offer an abundance of energy-dense and nutrient-poor foods, which are heavily promoted through deals or discounts.

Objective:

In this paper, we describe the development of the ‘DIGIFOOD’ dashboard to monitor the digitalisation of local food environments in New South Wales (NSW) Australia resulting from the proliferation of OFDS.

Methods:

Together with a team of data scientists, we designed a purpose-built dashboard using Microsoft PowerBI. The development process involved three main stages i) data acquisition of food outlets via web-scraping ii) data cleaning and processing iii) visualisation of food outlets on the dashboard. We also describe the categorisation process of food outlets to characterise the healthfulness of local, online and hybrid food environments.

Results:

To date, the DIGIFOOD dashboard has mapped 36,967 unique local food outlets (locally accessible, scraped from Google Maps) and 16,158 unique online food outlets (accessible online, scraped from UberEats) across NSW, Australia. In 2023, the market-leading OFDS operated in 1,061 unique suburb or localities in NSW. The Sydney – Parramatta region, a major urban area in NSW accounting for 28 postcodes, recorded the highest number of online food outlets (n=4,221). In contrast, the Far West and Orana region, a rural area in NSW with only two postcodes, recorded the lowest number of food outlets accessible online (n=7). Urban areas appeared to have the greatest increase in total food outlets accessible via online food delivery.

Conclusions:

The DIGIFOOD Dashboard leverages the current rich data landscape to display and contrast the availability and healthfulness of food outlets that are locally accessible versus accessible online. The DIGIFOOD Dashboard can be a useful monitoring tool for the evolving digital food environment at a regional scale and has potential to be scaled up at a national level. Future iterations of the dashboard including data from additional prominent OFDS, can be used by policymakers to identify high priority areas with limited access to healthful foods both online and locally.