Methodology and sources

What this map shows

Every retail food store licensed to operate in New York City's five counties (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island), plotted at the address each operator filed with the State. Stores are sized and colored by reported square footage so a viewer can see at a glance where full-service supermarkets exist and where the only options are corner stores or smaller specialty shops.

Source data

Why not Google Maps?

Google Maps has cleaner business categories than the state license file (it tags supermarkets as supermarket, pharmacies as pharmacy, and so on) and updates more frequently. We do not use it for two reasons. First, Google Maps Platform terms of service prohibit storing or redistributing Place content (name, address, category) for more than 30 days outside a Google-rendered map, which would make a public, downloadable, methodology-transparent map like this one impossible. Second, OpenStreetMap offers comparable category data under an open license (ODbL) that explicitly permits redistribution, and its NYC supermarket coverage is strong — including new openings the state file misses.

How stores were classified

The NY State retail food store license is a single license that covers any retailer selling packaged food: a corner bodega, a Whole Foods, a brewery taproom, a Walgreens, and a wholesale Restaurant Depot all hold the same license. Square footage alone is therefore not enough to identify supermarkets — a 20,000-square-foot Walgreens is not a grocery store, and a 7,000-square-foot Threes Brewing is not either.

To approximate "supermarket," we apply a name-keyword filter that excludes obvious non-grocery establishments. The filter excludes any store whose dba_name matches patterns like:

• Pharmacy / drug store: WALGREENS, RITE AID, CVS, DUANE READE, PHARMACY
• Dollar / discount: DOLLAR TREE, DOLLAR GENERAL, FAMILY DOLLAR, 99 CENT
• Convenience / gas: 7-ELEVEN, EXXON, SHELL, MOBIL
• Alcohol: BREWING, BREWERY, DISTILLERY, WINERY, LIQUOR, SPIRITS
• Restaurant / cafe: RESTAURANT, BISTRO, DINER, PIZZA, SUSHI, CAFE, STARBUCKS, DUNKIN
• Bakery: BAKERY, PATISSERIE
• Tobacco: TOBACCO, CIGAR, VAPE
• Religious / institutional / wholesale: CHURCH, SCHOOL, HOSPITAL, RESTAURANT DEPOT, WAREHOUSE

The complete pattern list is in collectors/nyc_food_stores.py. Stores that match are reclassified as "Other licensed food retailer." The name filter is run against the operator's dba_name AND legal entity_name, since some operators file an innocuous DBA but the entity name reveals the category (e.g., "FINBACK BROOKLYN" / "FINBACK BROOKLYN LLC").

Name patterns alone are not enough — an operator can name a brewery anything. So we also pull every NYC OSM feature carrying a disqualifying tag (craft=brewery|distillery|winery, amenity=bar|restaurant|fast_food|cafe|pharmacy|fuel, shop=alcohol|bakery|tobacco|chemist, etc.) and override is_supermarket=False for any state-file store within 25 meters of one. This pass alone reclassifies about 3,000 NYC stores that the name filter missed — including bars, restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and breweries with neutral business names. The categorization-by-OSM-tag approach is not perfect either, but it is dramatically more reliable than name keywords. The OSM override category is recorded on each store's popup (e.g., "Reclassified by OSM tag: craft=brewery").

Stores that pass the name filter are bucketed by reported square footage:

• Large supermarket: 10,000 square feet or more
• Standard supermarket: 5,000 to 9,999 square feet
• Small supermarket or grocer: 2,500 to 4,999 square feet
• Corner store or specialty: under 2,500 square feet
• Size unknown: square footage not reported

Throughout the map, "full supermarket" means a store that passes the name filter and is at least 5,000 square feet.

ZIP-level density layer

The density view renders a choropleth across NYC's 178 Modified ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (MODZCTAs) published by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Each polygon is colored by full supermarkets per 10,000 residents, using the population estimates that come with the MODZCTA file. Stores are matched to a MODZCTA via the operator-filed ZIP. About 50 stores have a ZIP that does not map to any MODZCTA and are dropped from the density view; they remain in the points view.

What the map does not show

• Prices. This is not a price tracker. Building a reliable, public NYC grocery price tracker is much harder than it sounds: in-store shelf prices are not published anywhere, and Instacart and other delivery platforms add a markup of roughly 5-15 percent that varies by retailer and by week. We considered building one and decided it would be misleading without a sustained budget for in-store collection.
• Quality of food sold. A 9,000-square-foot store stocking mostly packaged goods is not the same as one with a full produce, dairy, and meat counter. The state license data does not record this.
• Hours, parking, accessibility, SNAP acceptance. These matter for real-world food access and are not in this dataset.
• Stores that have closed since the file was last updated. The dataset reflects active licenses on file; closures take time to propagate.

Known limitations

• Data freshness. The state file was last row-updated on 2025-09-30 and last view-updated on 2026-04-23. New stores can take weeks to months to appear after they open. The Lidl at 120 Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn (Park Slope, opened early 2026) is a known missing entry. Other recent openings will have the same lag.
• License is not category. The state license does not distinguish supermarkets from pharmacies, breweries, or dollar stores. We use a name-based filter to approximate "supermarket," but the filter is heuristic and will miss edge cases.
• About 20 percent of NYC stores have no reported square footage. They are toggleable on the map but excluded by default from the supermarket counts. They are likely a mix of supermarkets and smaller stores; treating them as either would bias the picture.
• Address points are operator-filed and not independently verified against street-level imagery.
• The 5,000-square-foot threshold for "full supermarket" is a convention, not a legal definition. Some stores between 2,500 and 5,000 square feet are full-service in practice; some chain stores above 10,000 square feet are mostly prepared-food and convenience.
• Population denominators are 2020 Census totals (borough table) and DOHMH MODZCTA estimates (ZIP density layer). Population has shifted since then, but not enough to materially change the per-resident ratios.
• Four of the five planned public supermarket sites are not yet announced. The map will be updated when each site is identified.

How to reproduce this

Three collector scripts live in the project repository under collectors/:

• nyc_food_stores.py — pulls the state license file, applies the name filter, classifies by square footage
• osm_supermarkets.py — pulls every NYC shop=supermarket|grocery|convenience from OpenStreetMap via Overpass
• merge_sources.py — fuzzy-matches the two by 80 m proximity and adds OSM-only supermarkets as new features tagged source=osm
• nyc_zip_density.py — joins stores to NYC Modified ZCTAs and computes per-10k density

None require API keys. Run them in order. Outputs land in data/processed/.

The OSM contribution is licensed ODbL: © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Why this exists

In April 2026 Mayor Mamdani announced that New York City will open one publicly owned supermarket in each borough, beginning with a 9,000-square-foot store at La Marqueta in East Harlem. The stated goal is to lower grocery prices in underserved neighborhoods by removing the rent and capital costs that strain private operators. Whether the chosen sites are in fact in supermarket-poor areas, and whether prices in those neighborhoods actually move once the stores open, are questions that require a public baseline of where supermarkets are today. This map is that baseline. It will be re-pulled monthly so the historical record stays current.

Contact

Questions or corrections: open an issue on the project repository, or email the project maintainer.