Data Dashboards for Spending at Food Retailers and Dollar Stores

We continue to add new dashboards on our Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) web page. We have added two new dashboards added in the past week. One on spending at dollar stores (includes Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar) and another on general retailers (includes Walmart, Target, and K-Mart).

Here is an example of the general retail dashboard with Walmart selected.

We now have almost 20 data dashboards that are regularly updating with new data about our food system.

Consumer Food Insights - March 2023

The latest edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out.

We continue to see a fall both in the share of consumers who say they can’t find certain foods when shopping (i.e., stock-out rates are falling; see also my post last week on new research about stock-outs) and who are buying groceries online.

This month, we asked some questions about trust and importance of different food labels. Consumers said the most important labels were expiration date, ingredient list, and nutrition facts panel; the lase important were gluten free claims and religious certifications. Claims about “natural” and “healthy” were the least trusted.

We’ve been tracking trust in information about food from different organizations. In the past, we explicitly avoided listing Purdue, but we had been asking about two other universities: Harvard and Ohio State University (OSU). This month, we replaced OSU with Purdue. Purdue scored a +4, while OSU averaged -4 and Harvard averaged 7 over the past year. I’m not sure whether this means people think Purdue is more trustworthy than OSU, or that people are displaying some social desirability bias, since respondents know Purdue researchers are conducted the survey.

This month, we we broke down our results by employment status, comparing those consumers who are working age and retirement age, i.e., not working (ages 18-64), working (ages 18-64), working (ages 65+), and retired (ages 65+). We find, for example, that 27% of working age adults without a job experienced food insecurity in the last year compared to 12% among those with a job.

For these, and other results, check out the full report here.

Data Dashboard on Grocery Spending

My team at the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) at Purdue released a new data dashboard on consumer spending at grocery stores. This does not include spending at general retailers (like Wal-Mart or Target) but just those chains classified as grocery or supermarket.

Tackling and Solving Food Insecurity Through Private Sector Innovations

That’s the title of a new publication the team with the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) at Purdue released with Agrinovus Indiana as they launch their HungerTech challenge. The short paper presents data on food insecurity in Indiana alongside factors like broadband access, ruralness, location of dollar stores, and more. We encouraged priorities be focused on the following four issues: Developing and implementing innovative food access solutions for targeted populations, Empowering consumers to make healthy choices, Connecting consumers to food networks, and Creating analytics around food insecurity.

You can read the whole thing by clicking on the document below.

Government Accountability Office on Food Prices

In case you missed it, last week the GAO released a new report on food prices and the drivers behind the price increases witnessed over the past year.

Their key take-aways are as follows.

“Many factors that affect the food supply chain can affect retail food prices. It is difficult to determine the individual effect of any one factor on retail food prices, according to USDA officials and experts we interviewed. Some of these factors (e.g., weather) have posed long-standing challenges for the food supply chain, while others (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict) have had more
recent effects. These factors can also contribute to increases in prices for global agricultural commodities (e.g., wheat, corn, and soybeans), which in turn can affect retail food prices, as USDA officials emphasized.

Federal agencies may indirectly affect retail food prices, such as through their efforts to support the food supply chain. For example, selected federal agencies have taken some actions, such as offering regulatory relief and other flexibilities, to address supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, agencies do not have a direct role in controlling price increases, according to agency officials. ”