Canadian Food Environments Study

How healthy are Canada’s food environments? An in-depth look at Canada’s food environments

INFORMAS Canada was created in 2020 and funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to comprehensively examine Canadian food environments. In 2025, we launched a report compiling data on food environments in Canada from 2020-2025. The results are summarised in the graphical summary and the full report in English and in French:

What did we do?

We brought together published studies using INFORMAS methods and conducted a number of new studies in order to comprehensively evaluate all of the food environment domains in the INFORMAS framework. The report summarizes:

• An evaluation of government implementation of healthy food environment policies
• An evaluation of the commitments of major food manufacturers and retailers
• An examination of the nutritional quality of the food supply
• The use of nutrition claims on food packages
• A collation of studies evaluating children’s potential exposure to food marketing and advertising across settings—TV, digital media, food packaging, food stores and restaurants, recreation and sports centres, in schools and hospitals and in outdoor settings.
• The quality of school, hospital and recreation centre food environments
• Evaluations of consumer and neighbourhood retail environments
• Examinations of food and diet cost and the cost of healthy food baskets across the country
• A comprehensive evaluation of Canada’s food trade and investment
• An assessment on the implications of food environments for health equity

In addition, we published three complementary reports evaluating the quality of population diets, diet-related noncommunicable disease risk factors, and rates of diet-related noncommunicable diseases using nationally representative data.

What did we find?

The report demonstrates that the vast majority of food environments in Canada are not supporting healthier eating. The report concludes that bold and courageous policy actions are needed to create healthier food environments for current and future generations, and outlines a variety of policy recommendations that could improve food environments in Canada to support healthier dietary patterns and improve health equity.

Key INFORMAS Canada publications include:

The Canadian Food-EPI results from 2025 and from 2018

BIA-Obesity evaluations of food company policies and commitments from 2024 and from 2019

A list of other publications from Canadian food environment researchers can be found here: https://informascanada.com/publications