In 1995 the then Northern Territory (NT) Department of Health and Community Services released the NT Food and Nutrition Policy. One of the strategies identified in this policy was to develop a tool to monitor food cost, availability, variety and quality in remote community stores as the community store is a major contributor to the food supply in remote communities. The tool developed was the Market Basket Survey (MBS), the first survey of a sample of remote stores was conducted in 1998 and the first Territory wide survey was done in 2000. The 2017 Market Basket Survey (MBS) is the eighteenth annual survey of remote stores in the Northern Territory (NT).