Data Sources

Supermarket rankings

The supermarket benchmarks, called Superlists, provide insights into what supermarkets are doing to help their customers choose healthy and sustainable food. For Superlist Questionmarks collects data on products, promotions, policies and store design. All data is collected independent from supermarkets.

Product data is collected through different sources, amongst which: GS1, retailers and A-brands, Brandbank and by copying product information from webshops (scraping) or photographing the products. Questionmark develops its own software to collect, categorise and analyse its data.

Data on promotions is collected via webshops and physical promotional brochures.

Policy data is collected from publicly available sources such as websites and annual reports.

Data on store design is collected by visiting and photographing stores.

Details on the methodology for Superlist can be found in the individual Superlist Indicator documents, which are published with each individual Superlist. The overall research framework is currently only available in Dutch. This framework will be published in English in 2021.

Product rankings

The products benchmarks measure and compare product transparency and performance on impact on the environment, human rights, animal welfare and our personal health. Products are compared to each other within their product category, based on standardised and scientifically substantiated topics.

For our product benchmarks we use product data and supply chain data. Product data can be found on the package of a product: ingredients, nutritional values, labels, country of origin, etc. This data is collected through different sources, amongst which: GS1, retailers and A-brands, Brandbank, by copying product information from webshops or photographing the products.

For the collection of supply chain data Questionmark is licensed to work with the questionnaires of The Sustainability Consortium (TSC). TSC is a consortium of Universities. They develop science based sustainability metrics for consumer products. Data collection is done by companies participating in a program called Transparent on Sustainability, in which they fill in the questionnaires themselves and / or via public sources of companies.

Most of the data we use comes from sources which are verified by independent third party verification. For reasons of cost and time constraints, Questionmark does not conduct any extra verification on the collected data.