Food retailers are stores that stock staple perishable foods such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, bread, cereal, meat, poultry, or fish on a continuous basis and sell these items to the public. Store types include supercenters, grocery stores, convenience stores, combination stores, dollar stores, butcher shops, bakeries, and other specialty food stores. This mission focused on understanding how critical infrastructure failures impact the function of food retailers and how the change in functioning changes food access. This research focused on five infrastructure systems -- transportation, electric power, communications, water, and the buildings utilized by food retailers to carry out their normal activities. The functioning of food retailers was broken down into three branches or domains that are critical for the operation of a food retailer. Specifically, food retailers need 1) people to help run the operation, 2) property or, more generally, a physical structure or structures, to house and conduct operations; 3) products or food stuffs to sell. This mission includes four social science collections related to the in-person survey of food retailers. These collections include the sample frame (a list of all food retailers within the study area with a chance of being randomly selected for the survey), the primary (raw) data collected from the Harris County and Southeast Texas surveys, and an example of a secondary (curated) dataset that focuses on critical infrastructure failures and changes in food retailer functioning.
