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Healthy Online Retail Scorecard

Three-quarters of Americans’ calories come from food retailers, making grocery stores and the retail food environment key contributors to the diets and health of Americans. Along with most industries, the food environment is becoming more digitized. The expansion of online grocery shopping presents new opportunities for food access and food marketing 

Despite the growing use of online grocery platforms, there is limited research examining online food marketing practices. To address this gap, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) conducted a 2023 study assessing the marketing practices of the top revenue-generating online food retailers in the U.S. and the healthfulness of the online retail food environment. This report is the first of its kind to identify and rank individual retailer performance—thus promoting corporate accountability to increase healthy food marketing, decrease unhealthy food marketing, and make healthy food choices online accessible for all consumers. 

Scorecard categories

Our study scored and ranked the top revenue generating online grocery retailers in the U.S. based on the healthfulness of products marketed with price, placement, and promotion and the usability of the retailers’ website:

Key Research Findings

Overall, all the top revenue generating online grocery stores performed poorly in our assessment.

All retailers scored a C or lower on their overall score, which included assessment of online marketing practices (price, placement, and promotion marketing) and website usability. 

Most marketing in the online retail food environment is for food and beverages that are not healthy.

In our assessment, we found that 77% of products marketed through price reductions, 76% of products marketed through placement, and 78% of products marketed through promotion were not healthy.  

There are many opportunities for retailers to improve the usability and accessibility of the online food shopping experience. 

With all retailers scoring a C or lower in our assessment’s usability category, there is much room for improvement in retailer website usability. Improving website usability has important equity implications, as it can have the greatest impact on people who potentially stand to benefit the most from online grocery shopping, such as people who lack access to reliable transportation or people with disabilities. 

Retailers under the same parent company performed similarly in some categories. 

For the Placement and Usability categories, retailers under the same parent company had similar scores. These results may indicate that certain decisions related to food marketing and the online environment are determined at the parent company level. 

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