The co-location index distinguishes between retail chains that participate in the cluster scoring algorithm — anchors, hardware, warehouse clubs — and chains that appear on the map as supporting context but do not affect cluster grades. The latter category is the Food family within the retail brand family taxonomy. This article documents the United Kingdom and European Union food-retail coverage as of the May 2026 expansion.

Why Food Is Data-Only

The co-location methodology measures the convergence of large-format anchor stores: hypermarkets, hardware retailers, warehouse clubs. Adding a grocery chain to the scoring algorithm would dilute the signal — most urban areas have many grocery operators, so a "co-location" of one anchor and one grocer would provide limited insight into commercial density. Keeping the Food family data-layer-only preserves the index as a measure of large-format anchor convergence while still showing field operators the broader retail context around an anchor.

A Tesco store appears on the map as a green dot. It does not contribute to any cluster grade. It does appear in the inspector panel of the surrounding cluster as part of the All Locations layer.

United Kingdom Coverage

Three chains anchor the UK food layer as of May 2026:

These join the prior UK retail coverage of B&Q (hardware), IKEA (anchor), and Costco (anchor + warehouse). The Food layer roughly triples the on-map dot density across the United Kingdom while leaving the cluster grades unchanged.

European Union Coverage

Five Lidl country instances and four Aldi country instances were added in May 2026:

Aldi operates as two corporate entities — Aldi Süd (Wikidata Q41171) and Aldi Nord (Wikidata Q125054) — that split European geography along a north-south axis. In the Netherlands and Nordic-adjacent markets, only Aldi Nord operates. In the United Kingdom and Poland, only Aldi Süd operates. The OpenStreetMap brand identifier tag on individual store records is inconsistent across markets — many stores carry one identifier, the other, or neither. To achieve acceptable coverage in markets where the identifier tag is sparse, the ingest configuration falls back to a name-based query confined to the country's bounding box.

Coverage Observations

Three coverage notes surfaced during the May 2026 expansion:

Aldi Netherlands undercoverage. The first ingest pass returned three records via the Wikidata identifier query, well below the expected approximately 480 stores. Switching the configuration to force the name-based query fallback restored coverage to several hundred records.

Tesco sub-format leak. Tesco operates Express stores in transport-hub formats. A small number of these may be tagged with non-store tags in OpenStreetMap and dropped during the fuel-station and pharmacy filter pass. Field review of urban Tesco coverage is encouraged.

Food-family expansion is not exhaustive. Carrefour France, Auchan, Mercadona Spain, and other major European grocers are not yet ingested in their home countries. Adding each is a single chain configuration addition; these were not within the May 2026 sprint scope.

Why This Matters

For a Woodfine evaluation of a development opportunity in the United Kingdom or Continental Europe, the co-location grade tells one story: how many large-format anchors converge on this site. The Food layer adds a second story: what is the surrounding daily-trip retail density. A cluster with a strong grade and high local Food density behaves differently in the field from a cluster with the same grade in a sparse Food-density market. Keeping the two layers analytically separate but visually present is the design intent.

See Also

• retail-brand-family-taxonomy
• co-location-methodology