Recent Report Provides a New View of Food Sector Sales and Employee Counts in Proprietary Data

The National Establishment Time Series (NETS) is a proprietary time-series database containing the geographic locations, employee headcounts, and total sales for each establishment across all sectors, including grocery stores and food service outlets. USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) researchers recently compared NETS data on the food retail landscape with data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns (CBP) and the ERS’s Food Expenditure Series (FES) to better understand the data quality of the food sector information in NETS. The CBP includes county-level numbers on establishments and employment, and the FES provides food sales data at the national level. These data comparisons help confirm trends and dynamics of the food sector across data sources, while enabling detailed analysis at a more local level.