New USDA retail report promises insights but could be better
Though perhaps not quite as useful as it could be, a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service offers fresh data and insights.
Found here, the USDA said the report tracks weekly data but will be issued monthly. The report combines fresh and frozen sales when tracking fruits and vegetables; it would be helpful to have those stats separated, but alas, that is not the case.
A description of the report states:
The Weekly Retail Food Sales series is based on proprietary scanner data from a nationally representative sample of retail food establishments collected by Information Resources Inc. (IRI). Sales data are reported weekly, beginning with the week ending October 6, 2019.
Two publicly available summaries of the Weekly Retail Food Sales data are updated monthly by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS), a file with national totals and totals by 51 product subcategories (including alcohol), and a file 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. See Documentation for more information on product categories and subcategories and other variable definitions.
This series provides data on food expenditures by type of establishment, but not by commodity group. The Weekly Retail Food Sales series includes only sales from grocery stores and other retail food outlets.
TK: Showing some of the peaks and valleys of COVID-fueled demand in 2020, here are some charts created from the report’s initial spreadsheet:
