Development of an approach to forecast future takeaway outlet growth around schools and population exposure to takeaways in England

Neighbourhood exposure to takeaways can contribute negatively to diet and diet-related health outcomes. Urban planners within local authorities (LAs) in England can modify takeaway exposure through denying planning permission to new outlets in management zones around schools. LAs sometimes refer to these as takeaway "exclusion zones". Understanding the long-term impacts of this intervention on the takeaway retail environment and health, an important policy question, requires methods to forecast future takeaway growth and subsequent population-level exposure to takeaways. In this paper we describe a novel two-stage method to achieve this.

We used historic data on locations of takeaways and a time-series auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, to forecast numbers of outlets within management zones to 2031, based on historical trends, in six LAs with different urban/rural characteristics across England. Forecast performance was evaluated based on root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute scaled error (MASE) scores in time-series cross-validation. Using travel-to-work data from the 2011 UK census, we then translated these forecasts of the number of takeaways within management zones into population-level exposures across home, work and commuting domains.

Our ARIMA models outperformed exponential smoothing equivalents according to RMSE and MASE. The model was able to forecast growth in the count of takeaways up to 2031 across all six LAs, with variable growth rates by RUC (min-max: 39.4-79.3%). Manchester (classified as a non-London urban with major conurbation LA) exhibited the highest forecast growth rate (79.3%, 95% CI 61.6, 96.9) and estimated population-level takeaway exposure within management zones, increasing by 65.5 outlets per capita to 148.2 (95% CI 133.6, 162.7) outlets. Overall, urban (vs. rural) LAs were forecast stronger growth and higher population exposures.

Our two-stage forecasting approach provides a novel way to estimate long-term future takeaway growth and population-level takeaway exposure. While Manchester exhibited the strongest growth, all six LAs were forecast marked growth that might be considered a risk to public health. Our methods can be used to model future growth in other types of retail outlets and in other areas.