Food environments, at their basic level defined as the spatial distributions of food retail and other food distributors in the built environment (Widener and Liu, 2021), are considered a critical factor impacting food consumption and downstream diet-related health outcomes (Atanasova et al., 2022; Gamba et al., 2015). To overcome a focus on residential neighborhoods, researchers have been increasingly measuring individuals’ access or exposure to food retail using activity spaces, which represent the geographic areas a person is potentially aware of during their day-to-day activities (Cetateanu and Jones, 2016; Zenk et al., 2011). Methodological improvement notwithstanding, the associations between activity space-based food environments and dietary outcomes have been mixed. Some studies found positive associations between activity space exposures to certain food retailers and corresponding food consumption (e.g., Li and Kim, 2020; Liu et al., 2020), while other empirical work reported that activity space-based exposures to food retail had no associations or were associated with dietary outcomes in unexpected directions (e.g., Mackenbach et al., 2023; Raskind et al., 2020).

One possible reason for these mixed findings is that food environment studies using activity space measures have largely ignored household coordination around food shopping, which can take on various forms ranging from one member being primarily responsible for all food shopping to diverse ways of sharing and alternating this task among household members (e.g., partners do grocery shopping jointly or take turns buying food) (Lake et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2022). The different roles that individuals assume in household food acquisition can potentially affect how they interact with the food environment. Moreover, in consideration of other household members' potential contributions to food purchasing, food retail opportunities in their activity spaces may supplement or even determine the food access pertinent to one's diet. Therefore, food environment research that ignores household members may miss crucial information about what shapes a person's exposure to, and interactions with, the food environment, in addition to how the complex interplay between the environment and behaviors determines their diet. To address this issue, this viewpoint discusses the need for, and implications of, considering household members for measuring food access and disentangling the pathways linking the food environment to diet. Ultimately, we propose a conceptual framework that expands current thinking around food environments to incorporate household coordination.