From Static to Dynamic: A Preview of NYC’s Interactive Food Policy Dashboard
NYC Open Data Week – March 25, 2026
VIDEO | AUDIO | RECAP EN / ES / FR | INFO | INDEX
Speakers: Lauren Drumgold - Policy Advisor, NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy; Rositsa T. Ilieva - Director of Policy, CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute; Yvette Ng - Research Fellow, CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute
Moderator: Michael Xie - NYC Open Data, NYC OTI
Introduction to the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and Food Forward
Lauren Drumgold opened the session by introducing the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and explaining its mission to help make New York City’s food system healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable.
She explained that the office’s work is guided by Food Forward, New York City’s 10-year food policy plan focused on:
Food economy development
Food retail and accessibility
Food production and distribution
Sustainable food disposal systems
Rositsa T. Ilieva then introduced the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, describing it as a research and action center based at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy in Harlem. She emphasized the institute’s partnerships with community organizations, food advocates, and government agencies to design evidence-based urban food policy interventions.
Yvette Ng briefly introduced herself as a research fellow at the institute who had previously worked on dashboard development projects and was now part of the team building the new interactive food policy dashboard.
Evolution of NYC Food Policy Reporting
Drumgold reviewed the evolution of the city’s food policy reporting systems.
From 2012 through 2022, the city primarily relied on the annual Food Metrics Report, a narrative-style publication compiling food system data from city agencies and broader food-related initiatives.
The report covered topics including:
Food insecurity
SNAP participation
Emergency food distribution
Food procurement
Food standards compliance
Nutrition programs
Farmer’s markets
Green Carts
Food retail access
Urban agriculture
Food manufacturing
Food waste programs
Drumgold explained that although the reports contained extensive information, the presentation format had major limitations:
Static charts and maps
Large spreadsheet appendices
Difficult-to-analyze tables
Limited usability for researchers and advocates
She demonstrated how important metrics — such as funding levels, acreage, or participating farms — were embedded within text-heavy spreadsheet tables that required substantial manual cleaning before meaningful analysis could occur.
Feedback from advocates and academics pushed the office to rethink its reporting structure and improve public accessibility and data transparency.
Transition to “Food by the Numbers”
In 2023, the office launched Food by the Numbers, a more visually oriented infographic-style report designed to present major food policy metrics more clearly and concisely.
The newer format emphasized:
Visual storytelling
Quick statistics
Simplified graphics
Easier public comprehension
Examples shown during the presentation included:
School food education grant metrics
Nutrition incentive program participation
Grocery access initiatives
FRESH supermarket development
Shop Healthy NYC programs
Drumgold explained that while the newer reports improved visual accessibility, they still remained fundamentally static documents released annually.
Vision for the Interactive Food Policy Dashboard
The core focus of the session was the city’s upcoming interactive food policy dashboard, being developed collaboratively by the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute.
Drumgold described the dashboard as a major modernization effort intended to move city food policy reporting:
“from static to dynamic.”
The dashboard was anticipated for public release in summer or early fall 2026.
Key goals included:
Improving public understanding of NYC’s food system
Increasing data transparency
Providing downloadable datasets
Supporting policy analysis
Assisting researchers and advocates
Enabling interactive exploration of trends over time
The project relies heavily on publicly available datasets, especially those hosted on NYC Open Data.
Dashboard Architecture and Core Themes
Rositsa Ilieva explained that the dashboard homepage would function as a centralized “one-stop shop” for exploring the city’s food system.
The structure aligns with major themes from prior Food Metrics Reports while introducing dynamic interactive functionality.
Core sections include:
Food insecurity and food assistance
Meals served through city agencies
Healthy food access and retail environment
Food affordability
Food and climate
Nutrition and health outcomes
Ilieva emphasized that the dashboard integrates datasets scattered across multiple agencies into a unified interface where users can:
Filter data
Zoom into maps
Compare geographies
Explore trends over time
Download underlying datasets
Food Insecurity and Food Assistance Section
Ilieva previewed the food insecurity and food assistance section, which integrates data from:
SNAP
WIC
Community Food Connection
Food insecurity estimates
One preview visualization displayed:
Trends in pantry visits
Soup kitchen meal service
Counts of emergency food providers
Geographic distribution of providers
The dashboard combines:
Time-series charts
Geographic maps
Key statistics
Program metrics
allowing users to examine both scale and spatial distribution simultaneously.
Meals Served Through City Agencies
The meals section highlights the approximately 220 million meals and snacks served annually across 11 city agencies.
The dashboard includes agency-specific visualizations for organizations such as:
NYC Department of Education
Department for the Aging
and allows users to explore:
School breakfast participation
Lunch participation
After-school meals
Borough-level meal distribution
Longitudinal trends
Ilieva stressed that the dashboard aims to connect citywide totals with more granular operational data.
Healthy Food Access and Retail Environment
The dashboard’s food access section combines information about:
Farmer’s markets
Food retail incentives
Nutrition incentive programs
Grocery access initiatives
One featured example showed:
Farmer’s market locations
SNAP household concentrations by community district
Year-round versus seasonal markets
EBT acceptance
Health Bucks participation
Ilieva emphasized that layering neighborhood demographic information alongside food access data helps create a more equity-focused understanding of food retail environments.
Food Affordability Metrics
The affordability section focuses on the growing gap between food prices and household purchasing power.
Visualizations include:
Meal cost estimates
Borough-level affordability differences
Trends in food cost growth
Estimates of additional income needed by food insecure households
Ilieva framed affordability not simply as a pricing issue, but as a broader equity challenge tied to economic conditions across the city.
Food and Climate Section
The climate section links food systems to sustainability and greenhouse gas emissions.
The dashboard tracks:
Organic waste diversion
Food waste collection
Plant-based meal programs
Sustainability indicators
Users will be able to filter food waste data geographically and examine trends over time using NYC Open Data datasets.
Nutrition and Health Outcomes
The health section connects food environments with health disparities and diet-related conditions.
Preview maps displayed borough-level variation in:
Fruit and vegetable consumption
Sugary drink intake
Ilieva explained that these visualizations allow users to identify disparities and investigate relationships between food access and health outcomes.
Live Demo – SNAP Dashboard Functionality
Yvette Ng then conducted a live walkthrough of the dashboard’s food insecurity and assistance section.
The SNAP page uses NYC Open Data from the Department of Social Services combined with 2020 Census data.
Users can dynamically switch between metrics including:
Percent of population receiving SNAP
Number of households
Number of participants
Interactive maps color-code community districts according to SNAP participation rates, revealing particularly high participation levels in parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Ng showed how users can:
Filter by borough
Drill down into community districts
Explore longitudinal participation trends
Compare local and citywide patterns
One example highlighted Brooklyn Community District 304, which showed declining SNAP participation over time — potentially indicating either reduced need or unmet outreach challenges.
SNAP Outreach Metrics
The dashboard also includes information on SNAP outreach efforts and the USDA Program Access Index (PAI), which measures SNAP participation among income-eligible populations.
The city historically performs above the national average on the PAI metric, though Ng noted that the Department of Social Services estimates that approximately 20% of eligible residents remain unenrolled.
The dashboard tracks:
Outreach events
Community partnerships
Client engagement metrics
WIC Dashboard Section
Ng demonstrated the WIC section, which provides:
Participant totals
Participant breakdowns by women, infants, and children
Borough comparisons
WIC agency locations
WIC retailer maps
She explained that future iterations may incorporate contextual demographic layers such as poverty rates and food insecurity indicators to better identify underserved neighborhoods.
Community Food Connection Visualizations
The Community Food Connection section visualizes:
Food pantry visits
Soup kitchen meals served
Pantry and soup kitchen locations
Borough-level service counts
Users can interactively filter maps by:
Borough
Facility type
Specific provider locations
Ng emphasized that adding contextual background layers would help policymakers and advocates better evaluate whether food providers align with neighborhood need.
Food Insecurity Trends and Racial Disparities
The dashboard incorporates Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap estimates to track food insecurity rates over time.
Key findings shown included:
Approximately 17% citywide food insecurity
Roughly 1.4 million food insecure residents
Approximately 422,000 food insecure children
Ng highlighted several broader trends:
Food insecurity has increased since 2021
Children experience higher food insecurity rates than the overall population
Racial and ethnic disparities are widening over time
The dashboard enables community organizations to use these data for:
Needs assessments
Advocacy
Grant writing
Policy analysis
Mentimeter Feedback Session
The presenters then launched an interactive Mentimeter session to gather public feedback.
Participants identified themselves primarily as representatives from:
Nonprofits
Government agencies
Research and education sectors
The audience strongly agreed that they would use a dashboard with this level of detail and identified likely use cases including:
Research
Policy analysis
Advocacy
Community planning
Grant writing
Audience Requests for Additional Data
Participants requested additional data layers and features, including:
Grocery pricing information
Food quality metrics
Local food sourcing
Diet-related illness data
Disability-disaggregated data
Age-disaggregated data
Better data source documentation
Downloadable datasets
Storytelling features
Drumgold confirmed that the team intends to include:
Downloadable underlying datasets
Source citations
Last-updated timestamps
Narrative “data stories”
to contextualize visualizations and provide richer public engagement.
Development Timeline and Prior Work
Responding to a question from Rabia, Ilieva explained that the dashboard work builds on earlier NSF-funded pilot projects beginning in 2021–2022.
The current collaboration with the Mayor’s Office intensified during the previous year as the teams expanded the dashboard beyond earlier pilot food equity metrics into a comprehensive citywide food policy platform.
Praise from NYC Department of Health
Mahana Barbadillo from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene described the session as her favorite of Open Data Week and praised the dashboard as exactly the kind of tool needed for:
Community planning
Policy research
Public health advocacy
She specifically highlighted the future importance of food insecurity tracking in light of potential federal SNAP policy changes under HR 1.
Drumgold welcomed future collaboration across city agencies working to modernize public data reporting systems.
Closing Remarks
The session concluded with invitations for continued public feedback and collaboration before the dashboard’s anticipated public release later in 2026.
RESOURCES
NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy — co-presenter of the dashboard; Lauren Drumgold’s office
CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute — leading dashboard development and design; home of Rositsa Ilieva and Yvette Ng
NYC Open Data — primary public data source powering the dashboard
Food Forward NYC — the city’s 10-year food policy plan that the dashboard’s themes are aligned with
SNAP & WIC benefits — federal nutrition programs featured in the dashboard’s food assistance section
Community Food Connection — the city’s emergency food program (formerly EFAP) supporting 700+ pantries and soup kitchens
Feeding America – Map the Meal Gap — source of the dashboard’s food insecurity estimates
Health Bucks — $2 NYC farmers market coupons tracked in the healthy food access section
FRESH program — Department of City Planning zoning and tax incentive for grocery store development in underserved areas
Good Food Purchasing dashboard — MOFP’s existing city food procurement dashboard mentioned during audience Q&A