Table 9 Implications for future food environment research in Canada

• As food environments are impacted by multiple policy domains that synergistically shape population dietary patterns, a holistic monitoring of Canadian food environments, with greater efforts to monitor Food Trade and Investment, Food Labelling and Food Prices, should be a priority

• Greater efforts should be invested in the assessment of food environments in underrepresented settings such as the food service sector, healthcare and childcare settings as well as in the rapidly developing digital food environment

• Greater representation of alternative food systems (e.g., food systems of Indigenous Peoples) and of the various levels of the food system (e.g., independent and non-franchise restaurants or food retailers, food environments in rural communities) should be an aim of future research

• Equity considerations should be integrated within all food environment research domains to understand how food environment exposures may differ between population sub-groups, including Indigenous communities

• While research approaches will always be tailored to specific research objectives there may be common elements of food environment research methodologies and approaches across food environment domains that can be better harmonized to support comparisons over time and across jurisdictions

• There is a need for ongoing monitoring of the Canadian food environments across all policy domains as the provincial and federal governments implement policy actions to support healthier food environments (e.g., Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy; [6] the proposed Child Health Protection Act, Bill C-252; the Newfoundland and Labrador's tax on sugary drinks [30])