The consumer is often said to be the backbone of the U.S. economy, and that looks to be a positive factor for the food and agricultural sectors. The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its monthly advanced estimates of retail and food service sales, which are broadly encouraging from a macroeconomic perspective. The data show broad-based sales increases, largely driven by robust consumer spending. Consumer spending, of course, is nearly always good for the economy, provided it isn’t financed with unreasonable debt/income ratios. The Census Bureau’s latest data shows widespread sales increases across most industry sectors. Total retail sales in August were up from the prior month and also from the same month in 2018, afte...
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.