Reflecting widespread interest in concepts of ‘nudging’ and ‘choice architecture’, there is increasing research and policy attention on altering aspects of the small-scale physical environment, such as portion sizes or product positioning, to change health-related behaviour at population-level. There is, however, a lack of clarity in characterising these interventions, and no reliable framework incorporating standardised definitions. This hampers both the synthesis of cumulative evidence about intervention effects, and the identification of intervention opportunities. To address this, a new tool, TIPPME (Typology of Interventions in Proximal Physical Micro-Environments) has been developed, here applied to the selection, purchase and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. This provides a framework to reliably classify and describe, and enable more systematic design, reporting and analysis of, an important class of interventions. In doing so, it makes a distinct contribution to collective efforts to build the cumulative evidence-base for effective ways of changing behaviour across populations.