Animal Production and Marketing Issues: Retail Meat Prices and Price Spreads

Retail Prices

In 2002, ERS began providing monthly average retail price data for selected cuts and aggregate categories of beef, pork, poultry, lamb, and veal, based on electronic supermarket scanner data. The database contains meat-cut categories that correspond to BLS meat-cut categories and provide an alternative way to estimate retail prices. (This alternative process was mandated by Congress in the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999.) Along with the BLS categories, the ERS database includes price data on additional cuts, information on volume sold, and the discount effects of featuring. (An April 2003 Amber Waves data feature contains a few examples on how meat prices respond to featuring and season.) For more information and the data, see Retail Scanner Prices for Meat, which is housed at Colorado State University's Livestock Market Information Center (LMIC) as of October 2004. The pilot program between ERS and LMIC has monthly data running from January 2001 until April 2008.
BLS also publishes average retail prices for selected meat cuts. Scanner data standard table 1 presents average retail prices for selected meat cuts from both BLS and the supermarket scanner data. BLS collects prices from a larger number and greater variety of outlets, but they do not collect data on sales volume. Comparing Two Sources of Retail Meat Price Data (November 2009) compares BLS and scanner data, describing the differences between these two data sets and evaluating their relative strengths and weaknesses.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/AnimalProducts/PriceReporting.htm