Comparing Food Sector Employment Headcount and Sales Data in the National Establishment Time Series Database to Federal Data

Overview

This report offers new information about employee counts and sales of the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database—which provides time-series data on establishments across all sectors, including grocery stores and food service outlets. It also compares NETS’s employment count to the U.S. Bureau of the Census’s County Business Pattern (CBP) at the national and State levels from 1998 to 2016 and compares NETS’s sales to ERS’s Food Expenditure Series (FES) at the national level from 1998 to 2019. Furthermore, this report re-estimates NETS’s sales numbers, enabling researchers to more accurately study food sales at a more localized level.