One of the big questions for the balance of this year is how inflation will influence consumer spending on groceries and fresh produce.
Retail scan data is available from the USDA to help track consumer behavior and purchasing decisions.
The USDA’s Weekly Retail Food Sales series is based on proprietary scanner data from a nationally representative sample of retail food establishments collected by market resource company IRI. Sales data is reported weekly, beginning with the week ending Oct.6, 2019, according to the USDA.
From the report description:
Two publicly available summaries of the Weekly Retail Food Sales data are updated monthly by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS): One with national totals and totals by 51 product subcategories (including alcohol), and the other with State totals for 39 States by 10 product categories (including alcohol). Data are not available for Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Mississippi, Montana, and Washington, D.C., because IRI does not provide State-level data for those States and Washington, D.C. See Documentation for more information on product categories and subcategories and other variable definitions.
In addition, the USDA said national-level time series data on food expenditures is available in the ERS Food Expenditure Series. This series provides data on food expenditures by type of establishment, but not by commodity group, the USDA said.
With that said, let’s look at the performance of some produce commodities over time:
Obviously, the sales performance two years ago, at the pandemic’s outset, grabs our attention, first for dark green vegetables.
