INTRODUCTION:
Diet, or what people eat and drink, is important to health and wellbeing1. The belief that individual behaviours should be the primary focus for improving diet at the population level has been largely superseded by the understanding that environmental context plays a crucial role in how and what people eat2,3. Findings regarding associations between food environments and health and wellbeing indicators are somewhat mixed4,5. Part of the reason for this lack of consensus may be due to the variety of methodological approaches and level of rigour in measuring food environments6. The aim of this scoping review was to examine how recent Australian research has measured the following components of the physical food environment (which we refer to collectively as ‘food outlet availability’): (1) types of food outlets included; (2) identification and location of food outlets; (3) categorisation and/or characterisation of food outlets (e.g., as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’); and (4) definition and measurement of proximity to food outlets. While the focus is on Australia, we believe the issues discussed are relevant for many countries.

METHODS:
Medline and Scopus were searched in February and March 2025 for papers published between 2014-2025 that discussed measurement of food outlet availability or distance to food outlets of any type in any sized geographic area within Australia. The review followed the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines7.

RESULTS:
Fifty papers (41 studies) that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were identified. The overall finding was that methodological approaches varied widely for all four components of food outlet availability.

CONCLUSIONS:
This lack of consensus in how food outlet availability is measured has important consequences, as they impact the conclusions that are drawn about food environments and population health.