Both the Kenyan government and international development organizations have labeled problems of food access and availability a pressing policy issue. Due to many rapidly changing forces such as the nutrition transition, urbanization, and food systems change, consumers in low-income settings face a plethora of food purchasing choices, in terms of what to buy and where to buy it. These choices reveal themselves in the food expenditure behavior of consumers in response to their rapidly changing food environment (FE). People rely more on markets now than on own production, and thus food is becoming more purchased and processed to varying degrees of healthiness (Kenya National Food and Nutrition Security Policy 2011). Based on these themes and using a cross-section dataset from household-level and food environment surveys, food expenditure data is regressed against a proximity-to-outlet measure for various outlet types. The main result of this paper is estimated distance elasticities that measure the responsiveness of household’s food shopping expenditure to variations in distances to different types of food outlets. The results generally show that household’s location characteristic matters more than household’s average distance to outlets when it comes to predicting healthiness of food purchase. The paper also finds heterogeneity in these distance elasticities by characteristics such as main shopper age as well as household poverty probability and location. This research contributes a new application of the distance elasticity concept previously featured in international trade literature. It motivates future studies on food environment metrics within urban and peri-urban settings of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to better understand what drives food shopping behavior and how to increase food expenditures toward more healthy food options.
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