World Perspectives

Rising Menu Prices Slow Restaurant Sales

The U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly advance retail sales report, released last week, shows growth in restaurant and grocery store sales is slowing. The first notable point in the report was that total retail sales were up 3.16 percent in May versus the same period in 2018. Their overall robust growth suggests the backbone of the U.S. economy, consumer spending, is healthy and should support economic expansion. More germane to agriculture, sales for grocery stores and food service establishments (“bars and restaurants” in non-government statistical language) were down 0.1 percent and up 0.71 percent, respectively, from April. More telling, however, are the improvements over last May’s figures with grocery store sales...

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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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