This project investigates the spatial accessibility of healthy-food retail in peripheral areas of São Paulo, Brazil, where the lower availability of establishments selling healthy foods may reflect broader patterns of social inequality in large urban centers. Areas characterized by the absence or limited availability of such establishments are commonly described as food deserts, representing not only a spatial constraint on access to food but also a potential barrier to the human right to adequate food and to public health.
The study aims to develop quantitative methods to assess accessibility to healthy-food retail, investigate how accessibility measures vary across different data sources, and provide evidence to support public policies addressing food insecurity and improving the identification of food deserts. Two official databases are compared: the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal Brasileira, RFB) and the Annual Social Information Report (Relação Anual de Informações Sociais, RAIS).
Food-healthfulness classification follows the Locais-Nova methodology, which uses the Classificação Nacional de Atividades Econômicas (CNAE) codes reported in establishments CNPJ records to classify food-retail establishments according to the healthfulness of the foods they sell. Based on this classification, the AcessoSAN project proposed Group 0 (G0) as a subgroup of the original G1–G2 category, with the purpose of providing greater detail for establishments whose CNAE classification corresponds exclusively to healthy-food retail. Although the analysis focuses primarily on G0, the other groups defined by the Locais-Nova classification will also be mapped to provide a broader spatial characterization of food-retail establishments.
For instructions on how to run this work, see the repository README.
The pipeline was developed using the Quarto publishing system, along with the R programming language. To ensure consistent results, the renv package was used to manage and restore the R environment.
After installing the three dependencies mentioned above and setting all the keys, follow these steps to reproduce the analyses:
- Clone this repository to your local machine.
- Open the project in your preferred IDE.
- Install package dependencies by running
renv::restore()in the R console. This will install all required software dependencies. - Open
index.qmdand run the code as described in the report.
To cite this work, please use the following format:
Pizzonia, M. A. Jr. (2026). Mapping Accessibility to Health Food in Brazilian Favelas and Urban Comunities [Computer software]. Center for Metropolitan Studies, University of São Paulo. https://cem-usp.github.io/kernel-accessibility/
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@software{pizzonia2026,
title = {Mapping Healthy Food Accessibility in Brazilian Favelas and Urban Communities},
author = {{Marcio Antonio Pizzonia Junior}},
year = {2026},
address = {São Paulo},
institution = {Center for Metropolitan Studies, University of São Paulo},
langid = {en},
url = {https://cem-usp.github.io/kernel-accessibility/}
}
Note
The original data sources may be subject to their own licensing terms and conditions.
The code in this repository is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3, while the report is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Copyright (C) 2026 Center for Metropolitan Studies
The code in this report is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
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This work is part of a research project by the Polytechnic School (Poli) at the University of São Paulo (USP), in partnership with the National Secretariat for Food and Nutrition Security (SESAN) of the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development and Assistance, Family and Fight Against Hunger (MDS), titled: AcessoSAN: Mapping Food Access to Support Public Policies on Food and Nutrition Security and Hunger Reduction in Brazilian Cities. |
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This work was developed with support from the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM) based at the School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of the University of São Paulo (USP) and at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). |
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This study was financed, in part, by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Brazil. Process Number 2025/17879-2. |