Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices

The Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices (F-MAP) data product provides monthly food price data over time, across food groupings, and across geographic areas. F-MAP includes monthly prices for 90 food-at-home (FAH) categories across 15 geographic areas of the United States. The F-MAP contains two types of price measures for each food group, geographic area, and month combination: (1) a mean unit value price and (2) a price index. The mean unit value is a per quantity price, where quantity is measured by weight in grams. Price indexes are a unitless measure of the cost of a basket of goods and are used to measure price changes over time.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service (ERS) developed the F-MAP data product to provide detailed U.S. food price data for economic research and analysis of food prices, consumer purchasing patterns, and the food environment. F-MAP can also be used to model the effects of policies that could influence food consumption, diet quality, and health outcomes.

The 90 food groups in the F-MAP product are based on the ERS Food Purchase Groups (EFPGs) classification system. The EFPGs are a tiered hierarchy of products and include 90 detailed food categories that can be aggregated into summary categories. The food categories used in the F-MAP align closely with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015–2020 document and are designed to facilitate food and nutrition research. For a full list of the EFPGs and their descriptions, see appendix A of the Development of the Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices Data report.

The F-MAP data are developed using Circana OmniMarket Core Outlets (formerly Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) InfoScan) retail scanner data. The F-MAP currently includes data from 2012–18 and will be updated periodically to add additional years of monthly data, subject to data availability. A supplemental research dataset is also available for 2016–18, containing five additional price index measures, constructed using different formulas.

The F-MAP replaces the Quarterly Food-at-Home Price Database (QFAHPD) product, which provided quarterly price data for 1999–2010. Previous versions of the QFAHPD data and documentation have been archived. The F-MAP is modeled after the QFAHPD but differs in several ways, including the source of the underlying data (retail store scanner data versus consumer panel data) and the frequency with which observations are made (monthly versus quarterly). See the documentation page or ERS’s report on the F-MAP methodology for more information.

Disclaimer: The findings in this data product or stated on this page should not be attributed to Circana.

Recommended citation: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. (2024). Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices [data product].