New Gro Data Reveals Organic, Local, Conventional Produce Prices

Gro Intelligence has enhanced its coverage of US market-level prices and transactions with the addition of data from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) Retail Data Set. This valuable new data source adds weekly price and local sales data for over a hundred distinct fruits and vegetables, and often for over a dozen of their respective cultivars and packaging types across eight different regions. Users are able to analyze retail prices alongside other data sources providing producer prices in addition to the more than 50 million other data series in Gro.

The chart above on the left shows retail prices in the US Southeast region for different types of fresh tomatoes, including vine-ripened, organic, and heirloom varieties. On the right is a comparison of retail prices in the Northeast of organic and conventional red delicious apples in different size packages. (Click on the image for an interactive display on the Gro web app.)

AMS Retail Data focuses on prices. This includes both low and high prices across a given week as well as the average. Not only are these price metrics spread across hundreds of commodities and cultivars, but data also includes detailed information on a variety of packaging types—for example, both organic and conventionally grown apples in 2-pound, 3-pound, or 5-pound bags—which can reveal even more information about consumer preference.

AMS Retail also provides data on locally grown fruits and vegetables. For each commodity in its data set, AMS Retail measures the percentage of those items that are marked by distributors as having been grown locally. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of locally grown peaks during a given crop-location pair’s harvest period.

The chart below shows weekly high and low retail prices for conventional red delicious apples and those locally grown in the US Northeast. (Click on the image for an interactive display on the Gro web app.)