Tag: iri

Fresh produce generated $5.3 billion in sales during the four February weeks. This reflects $169 million in additional fruit sales and $314 million in additional vegetable sales in February 2021 versus a year ago.

New Year's resolutions, pandemic style, are good news for the produce department.

In December, consumers’ trip frequency fell below last year’s levels, much like it had in early April, while e-commerce transactions made a return to spring levels.

Looking toward the end-of-year holidays, 44% of Americans are worried that the holiday celebrations will cause a spike in COVID cases and over one-third are not looking forward to the holiday season as much as usual because their celebrations will be curtailed.

Eight months into the pandemic, the virus remains in firm control of how and where people spend their food dollar. Everyday sales have been on a slow march back to normal and restaurant transactions had come within 10% of prior year levels.

While shopping patterns are normalizing, food spending at retail remains highly elevated across most departments.

Excluding weeks that were affected by the 2019 or 2020 holiday demand, everyday demand is normalizing at around 10% above year ago levels.

For the week of August 30, fresh fruit and vegetable sales increased 4.7% over 2019. Frozen fruits and vegetables had a much higher percentage increase, at +17.7% but is the smallest of the three temperature zones.

Between January and August 16, produce sales in calendar year 2020 are $4.5 billion ahead of 2019 sales, with an additional 2.9 billion pounds of fresh produce sold. Fresh produce appears to be settling into an everyday demand pattern that sits about 10% above last year’s levels.