USDA ERS Food Dollar Series

The receipt, itemized. The USDA ERS Food Dollar Series takes the American food spending dollar and accounts for where every cent lands along the supply chain - farm production, agribusiness, food processing, packaging, transportation and storage, food wholesale, food retail, food services, energy, and the professional services in between. It is the Economic Research Service's input-output reading of who captures what, built on BEA input-output tables through the Agri-Food Economic Data System and comprehensively rebuilt in the March 2026 release.

The scope runs to 47 food spending accounts: six aggregates (all food, food at home, food away from home, and the alcohol trio), 28 food-at-home product accounts from bakery products to beef, seven food-away-from-home outlets from full-service restaurants to schools, and six alcohol product and outlet accounts. Every account reads across three bills - marketing, industry group, and primary factor - in millions of dollars and in cents per domestic food dollar. Within the Financial Exchanges & Data catalog it is the value-chain margin record, not a price ticker. Get a sample of this dataset cut to the accounts and years you model.

One measurement, twelve identifying facts. Three rows exactly as they ship:

Year           : 2024
Type           : Food
Channel        : All
Aggregation    : Type total
Account        : Xf1000
AccountName    : Food
Series         : Industry group bill
Category       : 8
CategoryName   : Food wholesale
ValueTypeDesc  : Total
Unit           : Cents per domestic food dollar
Value          : 6.3

Series         : Industry group bill
ValueTypeDesc  : Total
Unit           : Million U.S. Dollars
Value          : 137393.8

Series         : Primary factor bill
Channel        : Food-at-home
Aggregation    : Detail
AccountName    : Cereals
ValueTypeDesc  : Salary and benefits
Unit           : Cents per domestic food dollar
Value          : 49.3

Read together they show why analysts like this shape. The first pins the headline: food wholesale captured 6.3 cents of the 2024 domestic food dollar. The second restates the same cell in absolute terms - $137,393.8 million - so share claims reconcile to dollar scale without a second source. The third drops to a single product account, cereals, and a single primary factor, salary and benefits, at 49.3 cents of the at-home cereal dollar. The layout is linearized - one value per row keyed by account, series, category, value type and unit - which filters cleanly on five identifying columns instead of fighting a wide pivot.

Thirteen fields define every row of the current nominal series, each definition checked against the published data dictionary during the August 2026 research pass. The identifying columns stack into a natural key - year, spending type, channel, account, series, category, value type, unit - which is why joins against your own category master hold up without a crosswalk.

Two conventions worth internalizing before you build. Account codes all start with Xf plus four digits, where the first two digits encode the channel - so Xf1101 (Cereals) announces itself as a food-at-home detail account. And Category 8 within the industry group bill is Food wholesale, the cell distributor-margin models usually want first.

Geography - United States national totals. There is no state, metro or county cut anywhere in the series; the input-output construction prices the domestic supply chain as one system.

Temporal - the current model spans 2007-2024 annually. Archived files published under the prior 2011 model extend 1993-2023 in nominal and real terms, with real values expressed in constant 2017 dollars. The two vintages are built on different methodologies and are not directly comparable.

Granularity - one value per food spending account (47) per series (total spending, marketing bill, industry group bill, industry group by primary factor, primary factor bill) per industry group (13) per value type (total, salary and benefits, property income, output taxes, imported inputs) per unit - 126,900 rows in the current nominal series alone.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Your cadence is your call regardless of how often the underlying accounts move - most cells change on the annual cycle, and a scheduled warehouse load keeps dashboards current without anyone babysitting the pipeline. Every delivery ships the complete thirteen-field dictionary above, the sample rows, and the coverage profile mapped to the accounts and years you named.

• Distributor margin benchmarking - the 6.3-cent food wholesale share and its $137.4 billion 2024 dollar equivalent give wholesale and distribution teams an external yardstick for gross-margin arguments.

• Farm-versus-marketing share tracking - the marketing bill splits every food dollar between farm production and everything downstream, the cleanest public read on where price inflation actually sticks.

• Factor modeling - the primary factor bill decomposes each industry group into salaries and benefits, property income, output taxes and imported inputs; food wholesale's $74.3 billion labor component is one cell among hundreds.

• Channel mix analysis - food-at-home versus food-away-from-home shares quantify the restaurant-versus-grocery tug across 28 product categories and 7 outlet types.

• Category-level pass-through studies - detail accounts such as cereals support product-level chains from primary factor to final dollar.

• Citation-grade sourcing - methods are documented in ERS technical bulletins TB-1973 and TB-1974, so published numbers survive peer review and diligence.

Investors and quant researchers get a defensible margin series for food-system exposure models - see investors quants use cases. Data scientists and ML engineers get a linearized panel that pivots into features without cleanup - see data scientists use cases. Market researchers and consultants sizing food distribution get channel and category splits straight from the accounting identity - see market researchers use cases. Developers building data products get one flat schema across every account and year - see developers builders use cases. Journalists, academics and students get the canonical citation whenever a story says "only X cents of your food dollar reaches the farm."

• Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) - the successor to the Annual Wholesale Trade Survey carrying services-sector trade receipts; the head-to-head sets out when each answers the margin question.

• U.S. Economic Census - Wholesale Trade (NAICS 424) - merchant-wholesale receipts and margins at establishment grain, the absolute-scale complement to the food-dollar shares.

• Food dollar series glossary entry - the vocabulary - bills, shares, factors - defined once.

• Wholesale share of the food dollar - a worked read of the distributor slice this series quantifies.

• USDA Economic Research Service source profile - the agency behind the series and its neighboring products.