What is in a food store name? Leveraging large language models to enhance food environment data.

Introduction: It is not uncommon to repurpose administrative food data to create food environment datasets in the health department and research settings; however, the available administrative data are rarely categorized in a way that supports meaningful insight or action, and ground-truthing or manually reviewing an entire city or neighborhood is rate-limiting to essential operations and analysis. We show that such categorizations should be viewed as a classification problem well addressed by recent advances in natural language processing and deep learning-with the advent of large language models (LLMs). Methods: To demonstrate how to automate the process of categorizing food stores, we use the foundation model BERT to give a first approximation to such categorizations: a best guess by store name. First, 10 food retail classes were developed to comprehensively categorize food store types from a public health perspective. Results: Based on this rubric, the model was tuned and evaluated (F1 Discussion: This novel application of an LLM to the enumeration of the food environment allowed for marked gains in efficiency compared to manual, in-person methods, addressing a known challenge to research and operations in a local health department.