Sorry for delays in the forecast updates. The Government shutdown has ended most data updates
Over the last 20 years the grocery industry has become more unpredictable which has made strategy, planning, and budgeting more challenging. The proliferation of data and ML/AI techniques are helping to uncover underlying patterns that can be used to guide more confident strategies, plans, and budgets.​
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The landing page shows the six month outlook. It show what is happening to U.S. Sales, Units, and Food Inflation today and our projection over the next six months. Why six and not twelve months? Because of leading indicators and forecast accuracy, which degrades meaningfully after six.
We also track Channel trends to understand what types of grocery retailers are over or under performing, which often provides key insights into the the consumer. Lastly, the blog posts dig deeper into the forecasts and trends to provide a bit more detail and insight.
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Our goal is to provide retailers with a more confident view of future, so they can build more adaptive and accurate plans and budgets
Latest Blog Post
Food Inflation
6 Month Outlook
Things are starting to get interesting. August CPI FAH was up 2.7% YOY which is 50 basis points higher than last month. CPI FAH is up 2.2% YTD and 1.9% over the last 12 months.
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I have been patiently waiting for tariffs to start impacting the data and last month looked like it could be the beginning, but we now have two months, so the odds have meaningfully increased. Farm Prices, Food Manufacturing, and Grocery Retail Gross Margins are all starting to push food inflation higher.​
From the six month rolling forecast chart, we can see the previous forecasts expected food inflation to elevate over the summer but then start to trend down in the fall. Then last month, the yellow line, started to deviate from the path due in large part to the PPI Grocery and some increases in Farm Product prices. Then Food Manufacturing joined the party this month and resulted in the grey line which jumped significantly.
Looking at the forecast distribution, we are expecting the next five months to fall between 2.9% and 3.6%, which is up significantly from last months 2.3% and 3.0%.
Grocery Sales
6 Month Outlook
The biggest driver of U.S. grocery sales is food inflation so it is no surprise that the recent increase is pushing the grocery sales forecast higher.
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Previous sales forecasts were softening, but it is clear that the trajectory changes in August
For sales, the forecast had been missing on the high side, but that gap closed in August. The latest forecast is the grey line and it is clearly deviating from the earlier iterations. If CPI FAH continues to climb, we would expect grocery sales to follow.
The forecast distribution shows a range of 1.9% to 3.5% which is up significantly over last months 1.7% to 2.6%. The mean is 2.7% and if we grow at that rate for the rest of the year, Grocery Sales for 2025 will be about 3.0% YOY, which is signficantly higher than last years 1.8%
