Data Sources And Literature Review

General Overview

The tool built in this project is built based on the Excel tool created by the Iowa State University Food and Farm Enterprise development FFED. The documentation and calculations done in those Excel sheets were understood, recreated, and improvised in this package.

Data Utilized

ACS Data

The demographic data for this project is taken from the five-year American Community Survey(ACS) 2021. The plots in the dashboard showing the language, race, employment rate, and median income use the 2021 five-year ACS data. The population used in the function, Avg_Capita_Grocery_Spending(), of this project, takes the ACS 1-year data as of 01/01/2022.

Decennial Data

The population data for the visualizations in this project is taken from the US Census Bureau’s 2020 Decennial data. This data is used for the population because it is the full count and not a sample, unlike the ACS data.

IBIS Data

This project uses the 2022 total grocery sales data from IBIS World in the function Avg_Capita_Grocery_Spending(). The total grocery sales is the total money spent on groceries in the US in 2022.

BLS Data

The US Bureau of labor statistics(BLS) Consumer Price Index(CPI) data was used in this project for calculating the inflation from the base year. This value is planned to be updated every month on the website, but for this package, it is updated every six months since that does change too much every month.

BEA Data

Bureau of Economic Analysis’s data on regional price parities was used to adjust the spending according to the regional price levels after adjusting for the overall inflation using the CPI. This data is updated yearly.

Salesgenie

The 2021 Salesgenie grocery sales data and dollar store data were used to visualize the distribution of the different types of stores and the sales volume information.

Bizminer/Vertical IQ Percentages

Many of the functions used in this package incorporate percentages taken from both Bizminer and Vertical IQ, two financial analysis and market research firms, that determine how much of the total estimated revenue will be spent on a given category of expense. These percentages are based off of industry 3-year averages for grocery stores as of 2022. In this tool, these default percentages are the averages taken from Bizminer and Vertical IQ’s individual 3-year averages. Although the user has the freedom to choose their own percentage via sliders in the side panel, these Bizminer/Vertical IQ percentages are set as defaults.