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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): 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.
Data that are further disaggregated are available to researchers collaborating on USDA-sponsored projects. USDA-sponsored projects include USDA grants, USDA cooperative agreements, and direct collaboration with USDA researchers on an issue of interest to the Department of Agriculture (contact information below). Historical scanner data on retail food sales at the transaction level are available, with restrictions, to researchers. For further information on transaction level data, see Using Proprietary Data.
National-level time series data on food expenditures are available in the ERS Food Expenditure Series (FES). This series provides data on food expenditures by type of establishment, but not by commodity group. The FES provides monthly data, updated with a 2-month lag, in contrast to the more current data in the Weekly Retail Food Sales series. The FES also differs from the Weekly Retail Food Sales series in coverage. The FES includes food expenditures at grocery stores and other retail food outlets as well as establishments such as restaurants and fast-food outlets. The Weekly Retail Food Sales series includes only sales from grocery stores and other retail food outlets. The FES also includes the value of food produced by households and donated to households.
Note that the series is subject to revision based on periodic adjustments in methodology underlying the proprietary data from IRI.
In May 2022, variables for a comparison with the same week 3 years ago were added to the data files, maintaining a pre-pandemic baseline for users.
Note that the machine readable files provided in csv format should be used with statistical programs capable of processing large data sets.
Last updated: Monday, November 07, 2022
For more information, contact: Patrick W. McLaughlin, Alexander Stevens, and Xiao Dong