In-Depth Vendor Assessment
Overview of In-depth Vendor Assessment Tool. The in-depth vendor assessment tool is designed to assess. several food environment dimensions of a sub-sample of vendors/food outlets in markets and/or communities. The in-depth vendor assessment includes an observational checklist documenting the variety, labeling and sustainability properties of foods sold, how different food groups are stored, vendor hygiene and safety practices, as well as food and beverage promotion. This tool includes questions from Feed the Future’s EatSafe: Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (GAIN & USAID, 2023) vendor observations checklist, the Environmental Profile of a Community’s Health (EPOCH) (Chow et al., 2010), the World Food Programme’s Market Functionality Index (2020), and the Multi-Sectoral Food and Nutrition Security Cambodia (MUSEFO) study (GIZ, 2020). This tool provides detailed descriptions of the diversity of foods vendors are selling, the properties of those foods, vendor properties as well as food and beverage promotion.
In-depth Vendor Assessment Cover Page
In-depth Vendor Assessment Tool
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To assess the properties of foods sold by vendors as well as the vendors themselves.
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You should use this tool if you are interested in collecting detailed information about the variety of foods that are sold in different food groups, the use of labeling, how foods are stored (e.g., use of cold storage), vendor and food sustainability properties such as use of plastics, and the vendor hygiene and safety practices.
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The Participatory Mapping tool can be used to inform which vendor types (e.g., vendors at key markets, mobile vendors, food outlets in communities) should be included in the vendor assessment sample. To ascertain the vendor properties of those who are selling different types of foods, we recommend adopting a sampling approach that targets vendors selling different food groups (e.g., those selling fruits and vegetables, fish or animal-source foods, discretionary foods, etc.). The exact sampling approach will depend on the study goals and resources available.
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The in-depth vendor assessment tool captures the external and built food environments.
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The in-depth vendor assessment tool assesses the dimensions of food availability, promotion, quality, and sustainability.
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An enumerator completes the observational checklist at the vendor level.
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- Observational checklist
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Data collected with this tool can be used to calculate indicators related to the proportion of “healthy” and “unhealthy” food groups as well as food group diversity, sustainability, labeling, storage, and vendor hygiene scores.
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The strengths of this tool include the breadth of information that it captures related to vendor properties and practices.
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The tool is lengthy given the breadth of vendor properties and practices that are captured, it would likely only be used with a sub-sample of the vendors in a given community which limits its generalizability, and the scores generated by the analysis of the data have not yet been validated.
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GAIN and USAID. Feed The Future’s EatSafe: Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food https://www.gainhealth.org/impact/programmes/eatsafe
Chow, C.K. et al. 2010. Environmental Profile of a Community’s Health (EPOCH): an instrument to measure environmental determinants of cardiovascular health in five countries. PloS one, 5(12), p.e14294.
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). 2020. Multi-Sectoral Food and Nutrition Security Cambodia. Available at: https://www.giz.de/en/downloads/Factsheet_Cambodia_engl_201218.pdf
USAID Advancing Nutrition. 2023. Guidelines for Market-Based Food Environment Assessments. Instruction Manual. Arlington, VA: USAID Advancing Nutrition.