World Perspectives

Food Inflation and the Food Service Sector

September retail sales rose slightly more than expected and the underlying details of the report were solid. Sales rose 0.4 percent in September versus a consensus expected rise of 0.3 percent, while revisions to the prior months’ activity pushed the overall gain to 0.5 percent. The monthly increase was broad-based with ten out of thirteen major sales categories increasing, and the top category was food service, with the BLS data for sales at “eating and drinking places” up 1 percent. That was the largest increase for the category so far in 2024.  Sales were $96.4 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis in September; that was $1 billion higher than August’s upward-revised sales volume of $95.4 billion. Over the last year, sales in this...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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