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Detailed comments from the meeting: 1. *We very much enjoyed reading the paper and appreciate that while this the research question is not novel, the UK perspective is unusual given that much of this research has been undertaken in the US. We would like to thank the committee for their positive comments on our manuscript.

2. *We found the definition of a main meal difficult to appreciate and think this could do with better description and also a few examples to help readers appreciate this. We have now expanded on our definition of a main meal and provided examples, see page 7. We defined a main meal as being a menu option that would normally be the primary dish in a lunch or dinner meal and typically be found in the ‘main course’ part of a typical restaurant menu. Examples of main meal items using this definition would include burger and chips, chicken Caesar salad, spaghetti Bolognese, jacket potato with filling. Throughout the section of the main meal eligibility section of the method we have provided examples to make it clear what was and was not eligible. See page 7-8.

3. *The statistical analysis seems overcomplicated and inconsistent in places. Multilevel model is appropriate, but the goodness of fit test shows only that restaurants differ in mean energy which is unsurprising. Why use bootstrap for standard errors when the linear model provides them? Please comment We bootstrapped the data to improve accuracy and reduce bias of parameter estimations. In MLWiN bootstrapping the standard errors ensures they are properly scaled along with coefficients. We report this now on page 9. However, we note that running non-bootstrapped analyses did not alter the findings reported.

4. *The weighted multilevel model is unnecessary. Please also use logistic multilevel model to analyse proportions <600 and >1000 kcals. We no longer report the weighted multilevel model for our main analyses. Our rationale for its inclusion was that there were a small number of restaurants contributing a very large number of meals. For this reason we have retained the analysis in the supplementary materials. We now provide logistic multilevel models for the analysis of proportions. See page 10 and 12-13.

5. *We noticed that the results claim difference in mean intake between sit-down and fast- food, yet it is not significant (page 12), please reconcile this. All of the comparisons between sit-down and are statistically significant at p = .05 aside from the analysis on page 12 (p = .08) examining the kcal content of salad meals in the two types of restaurant. In this instance we are reliant on a much smaller sample size as the analysis is limited to salad meals and we believe it is probably a power issue (the mean difference is 201kcals, p = 0.08) given the reduced sample size. We have now clearly highlighted this in the Discussion on page 15-16. This analysis has no bearing on the main results reported abstract, as the analyses focusing on specific food types were additional secondary analyses because from the outset we reasoned that sample size would be a lot smaller (as outlined in pre-registered plan).

6. *What proportion of adults are estimated <600 kcal for main meal? This information would be helpful as background if available. This is an interesting question, but one we do not know the answer to. We have searched literature and re-read PHE’s reports relating to the 400-600-600kcal public health campaign and calorie reduction scheme. The only viable data source to address this question we are aware of (in the UK) is the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS). 2

One problem with the NDNS is that it is only a 1 day snapshot of a person’s dietary intake and information on main meal kcal content is not readily available. We would most likely need to code the data ourselves based on our definition of a main meal and we do not have sufficient time to be able to do so. However, we believe that there is a bigger problem with the NDNS: it is based entirely on self-reported dietary intake. Based on the NDNS the UK should have been losing weight, but we know this isn’t the case and it’s because self-reported energy intake is very inaccurate. Taken directly from PHE’s 2018 Calorie Reduction Report: ‘Current estimates of UK energy intakes from the NDNS show that mean reported energy intakes are 18-20% below the SACN estimated average requirements (EAR) in all age and sex groups, except for children aged under ten years when reported figures tend to be close to the EAR’. So any estimate of the % of adults meeting the 600kcal recommendation will be an underestimate and because reporting bias is associated with gender, BMI and the amount of food one is eating and also the types of foods being reported on, it would be difficult to adjust for this bias accurately. We appreciate that giving some numbers for background context is helpful to the reader and we have now provided info on PHE’s projection that the average adult in the UK is consuming approximately 195 kcals a day in excess. See page 4.

7. *Is it more appropriate to refer to energy intake rather than kcalorie throughout? We have reviewed the manuscript and prefer to use kcal predominantly because this is the unit of measurement for the study variable and meals high in kcals contribute to excess daily energy intake (so the two are distinct concepts in this context). We have now made sure that when referring to kcals and energy intake the differentiation is clear to the reader, e.g. on page 4 ‘Recent public health recommendations made by Public Health England suggest that adults should aim to consume 600 kilocalories or less for their main lunch and dinner meals to avoid excess daily energy intake and maintain a healthy body weight.’

8. *We wonder if it is important to comment on the fact that the lines between sit down meals and fast food outlets are becoming more blurred with the introduction of services that pick up and deliver food from traditionally sit down outlets? We have now commented on this in the Discussion. See page 16.

9. *For readers outside the UK, please can you clarify if the information on calorie content is freely available on line and on menus as some of our international editors were confused by this. Most restaurants do not have kcal info on their in store menus (based on a different research project we estimate about 15% of chains to provide this information), but many do provide nutritional info online. We have now noted this in the Method (8) and Discussion (page 15).

10. *We wondered to what extent are chain restaurants with 50 or more branches different from fast food outlets? Are they similar to establishments with one or two branches? Why was the threshold of 50 branches chosen? Are these all in a similar price range? Or are some "fancier" the others? The 50 outlet threshold was chosen because to make the work feasible we had to set a threshold (e.g. there are chains with 2 outlets but many are regional and therefore not what we would consider ‘major chains’ one would find in most high streets). Our scoping research suggested that few restaurants with less than 50 chains provided nutritional information, as it appears to be the larger chains who have the resources to do this. Thus, we reasoned that 50 was a reasonable number. We have made this clearer in the manuscript. See page6. 3

Regarding what the chain restaurants are like, this is variable, but we think they are distinct to fast food outlets. There are some that are cheap and position themselves as value for money (e.g. Hungry Horse, JD ). Others are mid-range (e.g. Pizza Express, Nando’s). There are no restaurants that we would consider ‘high end’ but this is a matter of perspective. All of the included restaurants and their meal kcal information is presented in Table 1 and in the supplementary materials we present the number of outlets for restaurants that did vs. did not provide nutritional information online. A more general point is that there is variability in kcal content of meals across individual restaurants and understanding why would be of interest (we agree with the committee’s comment that price range or market positioning may come into play), so we now mention this in the Discussion. See page 16.

11. *We think there should be greater discussion around the fact that this is based on restaurant reported calorie content and that this is a potential weakness of this study. We agree and have expanded on this section of the Discussion, see page 13-14.

Reviewer: 1 12. Thank you for the opportunity to peer review this article. It presents an observational study of energy content of meals in sit-down restaurant chains in the UK. The text was easy to follow and the study has the potential to enrich knowledge in the field of nutritional epidemiology. Please find below my questions/comments/suggestions regarding the methods and presentation of the work. We would like to thank the reviewer for their positive comments and helpful suggestions.

13. Abstract: please include the number of studied restaurant chains by type (27  6 and 21) and the number of studied eligible meals (13,396); also please clearly state that breakfast meals and beverages were excluded from the kcal count. We have now made it clearer in the abstract that only lunch and evening meals were sampled and that beverages were excluded from the kcal count. We have also included information on the number and type of restaurant chains sampled, as well as the total number of eligible meals.

14. Methods: The utility of bootstrapping (p. 9, line 201) is unclear and its results are never evoked or discussed. Please revise and clarify. Bootstrapping the data allows for improved accuracy and reduced bias of our parameter estimations, and is recommended (this is now clarified in the methods, see page 9). Furthermore, we note that non-bootstrapped estimations were not substantially different.

15. Methods/Results/Discussion: it would be very useful to the reader to see information about (and discussion of) the % of studied meals marketed (ie, noted on the menu) as being “healthy.” We did not formally extract this information (as meals marketed as being healthy were rare) and more often than not any information of this nature was not denoted in the item name or description (the info that we have extracted) and instead menu options had a symbol or * near it to indicate it was a healthy choice. We therefore do not have extracted data on this or formal figures to cite. We now discuss this issue in relation to calorie labelling policy in the Discussion. See page 15.

16. Results: Regarding variance information (pp. 11-12), the authors interchangeably use SD and SE. Please revise for purposes of consistency. 4

We now report SE throughout the Results section. For Tables 1 and 2 we choose to also present SDs here for descriptive purpose (i.e. Tables 1 and 2 give the reader more intuitive values to allow appreciation of the variability of meal kcals within and across restaurants).

17. Results: the following text should be edited and moved to the Methods section (p. 11, lines 251-256):= “Because there was an unexpectedly large amount of variability in the number of meals that individual restaurants contributed to analyses (see Table 1) we conducted weighted multi-level analyses. We computed raw weights for level 1 (meal level) and level 2 units (restaurant level), using the formulas set out in Pillinger (2011). Conditional level 1 weights were calculated as 1 / wi|j, where wi|j was the probability of a meal being selected from all meals in the same restaurant. Level 2 weights were calculated as 1 / wj, where wj is the probability of selection of the restaurant that the meal belongs to from among all restaurants in the sample.” Due to guidance from the committee statistician we no longer report weighted analyses in our main results section and therefore this statement has been removed. 18. Discussion, p.13, line 297: please remove “all” from the sentence as it might be interpreted in a misleading fashion (cf. comment below). ‘All’ has been deleted.

19. Under limitations (p. 13): please clearly state that the study was based on only 52% of the eligible restaurant chains (27/52) which might entail bias (please discuss). Also, please note and discuss the very large variability of mean energy content per restaurant (cf, Table 1). We have now provided more detail on these considerations. See page 13 (limited to 27 restaurants) and page 16 (variability).

20. Supplemental table 1: please add the data listed under Methods (page 6, lines 131-132; ie., “annual turnover, popularity, number of users, and number of outlets”) – that information will be very useful to the reader in grasping the overall context and importance of the study. We have included the number of outlets for each chain. However, we have not included the other metrics because we gathered these metrics from varied sources to identify potentially eligible chains (i.e. those with 20 or more outlets) and then verified whether chains had a sufficient number of chains to be eligible. This is explained in the manuscript, see page 6. We have looked into the possibility of providing this additional information, but we cannot gather reliable data for each restaurant. For example, we can access companies’ annual reports for turnover information, but some restaurants are part of worldwide corporations, and report annual worldwide turnover, but not split by country. In addition, some chains are owned by larger companies. For example, Hungry Horse and Chef and Brewer are owned by Greene King PLC and the annual report for Greene King includes revenue for all those brands, not individual restaurant brands. Given that the only eligibility criteria in our study was number of outlets we believe that providing this information is sufficient.

21. The word “kilocalorie” was abbreviated on p. 8 and the abbreviation was then used throughout the Methods and Results, yet in the Discussion the authors reverted back to the full word. Please revise for purposes of consistency. 5

We have revised our use of the abbreviation throughout. The first instance of kilocalorie is followed by (kcals) in the abstract and kcals is used from then on. We have followed the same approach in the Introduction/main manuscript.

22. The acronym “NHS” is used only once and never defined. Please revise. We have now defined this acronym. See page 10.

Reviewer: 2 23. This is an interesting and important analysis of restaurant meals in the UK. Most previous restaurant research has been done in the USA, so this is a welcome addition to the field. The authors have done a careful study with appropriate sample selection and statistical analyses. We would like to thank the reviewer for their positive comments and helpful suggestions.

24. A general point is that the 1000 kcal definition of 'excessive' is your own definition without grounding in e.g. international recommendations. It can also be argued that it is very conservative, given the public health recommendations are much lower (600 kcal). Rather than making the focus of this paper a new definition of what excessive means I would suggest you simply delete this except as text mentions. The comparison with public health recommendations (e.g. xx% over 600 kcal) and the mean values are important data that get diminished by the frequent use of this new non-standard metric. We believe that the use of an ‘excessive’ cut off is useful for descriptive purposes and in particular, our findings show that there are far more excessive kcal meals than those meeting public health recommendations of 600kcals. Without an excessive criteria we are unable to provide readers with some idea of how the data is dispersed. For example, it is feasible that most meals do not meet the 600kcal recommendation, but few exceed 750kcals. This situation would be qualitatively different to what we found: not only do many meals fail to meet the 600kcal recommendation, but of those that do not, a sizeable proportion miss that cut off by some distance and are excessive in their energy content (1000kcals or more). To address the reviewer’s concern we now discuss this issue in more detail in the Discussion. In particular, we note that it is not an internationally recognised cut off, our use of it is for descriptive purposes and we explicitly note that we are in no way suggesting it should become a default criteria. See page 15.

25. The numbers appear backwards relative to the text in some instances (e.g. "fewer meals meeting public health recommendations (30% vs. 12%) in the Abstract should have the text words or the numbers flipped to make sense. That happens in a few places. We have now edited these sections to make it clearer. See Abstract.

26. The page 8 comment on inter-coding consistency (lines 192-195) seems at odds with the careful methodology for the rest of the study. Why not just go back and check this? The inter-coding consistency approach was pragmatic given the very large number of included meals. There were often multiple menus (e.g. lunch, dinner) and multiple menu sections (e.g. kids, starters, sharers, desserts, breakfast, sides, drinks) which contribute to thousands of potential individual items to code. We therefore did not record each individual item (e.g. items on the breakfast menu) on each menu and then ask each coder to rate this as being eligible or ineligible, because for a large number of these items are largely irrelevant and ineligible (e.g. individual sides, drinks, breakfast items) in the present study. Because of time and resource constraints it is not possible to do so now. We appreciate this approach may be preferable as it is more common, but it was not feasible in the present project. However, we do note that the approach to assessing inter- 6 coder consistency we did adopt yielded a very high level of consistency and we are clear about why we adopted this approach in the manuscript.

27. What did you do about things like Pizza? In the US you can order a whole pizza (that is the default order) and it serves multiple people. In our analyses we had to delete pizza because of the total uncertainty over how many portion sizes it was. Unless there was a clear indication that a menu item was likely intended to be consumed by one person we did not include that item in our data set. We noted this as a potential issue for pizza dishes during scoping (see coding protocol in supplementary materials) therefore a lot of pizzas were not eligible for inclusion (e.g. large pizza from ). However, some pizza-based dishes were eligible as they were part of the main meal section of a menu and not described as being ‘to share’ or to serve multiple people (e.g. some restaurants have small pizzas for one). Pizza was available on the minority of restaurant menus included and our motivation to the approach adopted was determined by the same concern that the reviewer notes: for the larger pizzas that are typically intended to be shared, we would not be in a position to estimate portion size. This approach is covered in the method, but we have made a note in our Discussion that we did not include menu items that are typically shared, so the reader is more aware of this. See page 14.

28. I did not see this listed as a weakness - that you did not verify the kcal/serving with a direct measurement of energy intake by bomb calorimetry. It is unlikely but how do you know that there is simply great inaccuracy in the sit-down menus and the sit-down menus and fast-food restaurants have equivalent kcal and different accuracy of reporting. It would be ideal if possible to get accuracy measured in a subset, it would add great strength to the results, which are important. In response to another reviewer comment we have now discussed this limitation in more detail. As discussed in the revised manuscript, we believe that the direction of any error is most likely to be underestimation, which would suggest that our main conclusions about the kcal content of foods being excessive would be unchanged. Likewise, given the size of difference in mean kcals between fast food and sit down restaurants, any systematic error between the two restaurant types would have to be unreasonably large to affect the validity of this finding. For these reasons we note this as a limitation, but not a major limitation or flaw. See page 13-14.

Reviewer: 3 29. I think that this is an important contribution to the research on the food landscape in the UK. It is relevant to nutrition policy, and is likely to be of interest to policy makers as well as a general readership of doctors. The article covers the topic well and in an appropriate level of depth, with appropriate reference to the wider literature. The authors describe their research question well and make a convincing case that the food served in sit-down restaurants tends to be more calorific than that served in fast food chains. Their conclusions are based on reasoned argument from the results presented and the context of current literature. This is a highly appropriate paper for the BMJ's Christmas issue. In the tradition of this issue, it highlights an important and interesting lacuna in the literature which is also quirky enough to attract the attention of a general readership, and to spark impassioned discussion among the readership. While I feel generally positive about this paper, and congratulate the authors on its preparation, I have a number of concerns which are listed below. We would like to thank the reviewer for their positive comments and helpful suggestions. 7

30. The authors should include some discussion of the increasing blurring of boundaries between restaurants. They have intended to include primarily sit-down restaurants, but with the increase in services like Deliveroo and UberEATS, these are increasing also serving as take-away/delivery vendors. The boundaries are not as clear-cut as they once were. We agree and in line with another reviewer comment we now do so in the Discussion. See page 17.

31. On p4, the authors suggest that "public health action in the UK to date has focused largely on encouraging the food industry to make reductions to the kilocalories content of supermarket food". I think that characterisation is unfair. For example, many local authorities have taken action through planning legislation to influence the siting of restaurants and take-aways. National action has included, for example, the soft drink industry levy which includes both supermarket and restaurant purchases. The PHE 400/600/600 campaign, to which the authors refer, has a considerable component focusing on food purchased from takeaway outlets. This sentence should be revised. We have revised this sentence to be clearer. We agree those other initiatives are important and are now more specific in our conclusion, as the key point is that the kcal content of the out of home food sector has received little attention - ‘public health action in the UK to improve the nutritional quality of food has focused largely on encouraging the food industry to make reductions to the kcal content of supermarket food and has not focused on the eating out sector’.

32. I am not clear how the authors determined what constituted a meal. I understand that they had two coders who had a high degree of consistency in their coding on this, but I don't understand what their criteria or process was. Was this about combinations of items which were listed on the menu as meals? Was this purely about the coders' subjective assessment? Were there any screening criteria? Previous work has, for example, set a minimum calorie threshold for classification as a "main meal" - I'm not clear whether this method was employed by these authors, and if not, why not. I think there needs to be some clairication on terms used throughout. "Meals" is sometimes used to refer to the items under assessment, but at other times is used more generally (e.g. when discussing people's purchase of desserts). This gets confusing at times. We have provided more detailed information on the coding and eligibility criteria in response to another reviewer comment. Please see pages 7-8. We also provide the full coding criteria used in the supplementary materials and this is noted in the manuscript. We have also reviewed our use of the term ‘meals’ and for consistency we refer to ‘main meal’ when referring to the included meals in this study and avoid use of the term ‘meal’ elsewhere to reduce any confusion.

33. The authors excluded coffee shops from their analysis, but didn't provide a clear reason for this. This does not seem like a major problem in their work, but their reasoning should be explained. Our focus was on traditional sit down restaurants and fast food restaurants, in part because the small amount of existing data from the US has taken this approach and it allows some comparison. It would have been preferable to examine all market sectors (including coffee shops) but it was not feasible given the resources available. We have addressed this limitation and question for future research in the revised Discussion. See page 17. 8

34. On page 14, the authors discuss their assumption that sit-down restaurants may sell more drinks/starters/desserts than fast food restaurants, and so their work may underestimate the difference in calorie consumption between the two types of establishment. I agree with their assumption, but would of course prefer this to be evidenced - I would have thought that such evidence may be available by comparing financial annual reports of restaurant chains to see e.g. comparative dessert spend/profit. It may be worth the authors exploring this. Our wording here was slightly misleading as we were referring to both fast food and sit down restaurants (not only the latter), so we have now edited this sentence. See page 14. As an aside, we looked into the possibility of answering the query that the reviewer notes here and we were unable to find available data that would adequately answer this question. It may be the case that consumers are more likely to order extra sides or desserts in sit down vs. fast food restaurants but because we don’t have any data to qualify this presumption we prefer to not speculate in the manuscript.

35. I am not sure why either of the footnotes in this paper are presented as footnotes - both contain important qualifications which should be in the main text. Due to a requested change to the reported analyses footnote 2 no longer exists. Our preference is that footnote 1 remains as a footnote given that it is providing additional clarification on a relatively minor point. However, we are happy to be guided by the editorial office if they believe the footnote should be removed.

36. I found the second sentence of "results" in the abstract difficult to follow, as it wasn't clear to me what was being compared with fast food restaurants. I would suggest rewording to "Compared to fast food restaurants, sit-down restaurants offered signficantly more..." We have changed the sentence accordingly. See abstract.

37. I am slightly uncomfortable with the use of the phrase "pandemic proportions" in the first sentence of the introduction. "Pandemic" has a specific and precise meaning which does not apply to non-infectious diseases such as obesity. I accept that this characterisation is supported by the supplied reference, but it felt a little unscientific and alarmist to me. I would prefer a more measured description, such as the incidence of obesity having reached a level in most countries which threatens public health (or perhaps even quote specific figures). We have removed the word ‘pandemic’. See page 4.

38. p3 line62 - "excessively" should read "excessive" Change made. See Abstract.

39. p4 line105 - "out of the home" is redundant and may cause confusion. Deleted.

40. Nando's should have an apostrophe throughout. Changed throughout.

Reviewer: 4 41. This is a cross-sectional observational study that investigates the typical energy content of meals served at ‘sit down’ / ‘casual eating’ outlets compared to fast food outlets and recent PHE guidelines for adult mealtime energy intake. This area of dietary intake is largely under researched and this manuscript raises some interesting points. It also 9

highlights the difficulties of research in this area – e.g. definitions of different types of food outlet and what a ‘main meal’ is. We would like to thank the reviewer for their positive comments and helpful suggestions.

42. Abstract: Lines 51 and 53: Replace ‘kilocalorie’ (the unit of measure) with ‘energy’ In response to another reviewer comment and for consistency we prefer to retain use of the term kcal in this part of the Abstract, as kcal is then used throughout the remaining parts of the Abstract,

43. Introduction: – replace ‘kilocalories’ for ‘energy’ See response above.

44. - line 120: I feel this statement needs some justification, as many businesses are aware of the likely changes that will be required (and consumer trends for healthier alternatives) therefore companies have been making in-roads into including healthier choices. The statement refers to our suggestion that the fast food sector has likely faced more pressure over the nutritional quality of its food historically (compared to the sit down sector) and this may have resulted in them being more likely to reformulate products to be healthier. We agree that this statement is speculative and we now have edited it to make it clear that we are speculating (see page 5). We believe that it is a reasonable enough point to speculate on and we cite others who have made a similar line of argument and show that in the US, the nutritional quality of fast food meals have improved over time. It is interesting to note that our results do support the idea that the fast food industry have a greater proportion of lower kcal options than the sit down restaurant industry.

45. Methods: Line 139: Classification ‘fast food and ‘sit down’ does seem a grey area – as outlets can provide both (assuming deliveries count as take-away/fast food?). It would be good to see some clarification on how this was dealt with. We have outlined the classification method in the Methods section (page 6-7). When assessing restaurant type we were aware that more sit down restaurants are now providing take-away options, but in the UK this tends to be ordered online and delivered to homes (as opposed to being in store). Method described below: To categorise restaurant chains as ‘fast food’ or ‘sit down’, based on previous research, e.g.28 we used the following definition of fast food restaurants: ‘Restaurants that primarily provide consumers with largely pre-prepared ‘quick’ meals with little or no table service, with in-store seating and in which take-away orders are likely to account for a significant proportion of orders’. We did not include coffee shop chains or chains that only provided take-away food (i.e. no physical restaurant). Two researchers independently coded each eligible restaurant as fast food or sit down and any disagreements were resolved through discussion. We also recognise that the boundaries between take-away and sit down restaurant change are now being blurred and in response to another reviewer comment we now discuss this. See page 17.

46. Line 206: please add definition of ‘meal types’ (e.g. burger – only beef?, salads - including those with meat? - as potentially not comparing like with like in the analyses). We included all types of burgers and all types of salads, providing that they were eligible as main meals. Both types of restaurant included meat, vegetarian and fish based burgers and salads. We lack the sample size numbers to make very direct like-with-like comparisons (e.g. chicken Caesar salad). However, we provide all of the individual menu items and their kcal content for each restaurant in open access data files (repository 10 location referred to in the manuscript), so an interested researcher could pursue this if they wish to.

47. Results: Line 245: ‘raw’ add weight into this sentence I would recommend reporting the number (%) of ‘excessive’ meals for each outlet. As the number of ‘healthier’ options (i.e. within guidelines) as well as the energy content of all meal options is an indicator of the ‘healthiness’ of a product offer. The data the reviewer is referring to is reported fully in Table 1. We choose not to list the values for all 27 restaurants in the text as this would be a very long text section.

48. I note that in the supplementary text ‘healthy’ meal options were excluded – this probably needs stating in the main methods section. This is not the case. We believe the reviewer has misread the supplementary document as it states they ‘were eligible’.

49. Tables – show kcal results rounded to nearest integer We are not aware of BMJ guidance on this, so we reported values to 1 decimal place (as we normally do) and would like to retain. However, if the editorial office requires us to change this because of journal guidelines we can do so.

50. Discussion. Line 322+ limitations to consider: - Small sample size for fast-food restaurants for comparison. - Potential bias from businesses not included due to missing nutritional data? - Complexities in classification, e.g. included (as fast food) but other sandwich shops excluded as ‘pre-packed’ (e.g. Pret, Eat). We do not believe that sample size for fast food restaurants is a limitation. We have a very large sample size (in terms of main meals included) across both sit down and fast food restaurants, so statistical power in our main analyses is unlikely to be an issue. In the UK, there are only a small number of fast food chains, so our number of eligible fast food restaurants included reflects this. However, we do note that sample size is more of an issue in some of our additional analyses and we now include this in the Discussion (see page 16). A related point is that the number of eligible fast food chains is because a large number of fast food restaurants in the UK are independent and our study did not sample independents, which we now outline as a study limitation in the Discussion on page 15. We have also now discussed the missing nutritional data from businesses as a limitation (see page 13-14). Finally, there are complexities in classification and there is now a blurring of market category boundaries. We have now discussed this issue and that future work would benefit from characterising other types of businesses (page 16).