Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Due to the inconsistency on the coverage of random weight items over the analyzed period,
we separate the four-year period into two, i.e. 2005-2006 and 2007-2008. The shopping-
duration criterion was applied to ensure that each panelist was faithful in recording
purchases and remained in the panel for the entire period. The resulting dataset had 710
households with a total of 45,877 shopping trips in 2005-06 sample and 942 households with
48,469 trips in 2007-08 sample. The selected retail chains for our analysis include 2 value-
oriented retail chains consisting of 29 (37) stores, 4 traditional supermarket chains featuring
172 (147) stores, and 1 high-end specialty supermarket chain with 6 (7) stores in our 2005-06
(2007-08) sample.
2.3 The consumer profile
Descriptive statistics of the consumer profile are provided in table 1. The statistics show that
there were significant reductions in shopping frequency and basket size over the two
sample periods, which may indicate a greater reliance on food away from home during the
latter period. Our data may also pick up some impact from the economic downturn for the
U.S., particularly in the latter half of 2008 when the housing related credit crisis began to
pick up steam. In this trend of consumption reduction, organic food is however relatively
less affected as its share to total food consumption has increased from 1.20%/1.24% to
1.84%/1.93% in terms of frequency/spending (dollar amount). We observe no significant
changes in household demographics, with an exception that the percentage of household
with pre-school children (age<6) had increased from 5.8% (2005-06) to 9.8% (2007-08) on
average.
2.4 The retailer profile
Table 2 depicts the characteristic differences among the retailers of three store formats.
Location or network wise, high-end specialty stores are much less accessible compared to
the other two formats as shown in number of stores, share of trips, share of spending, as
2005-06
2007-08
value-
oriented
super-
markets
high-
end
value-
oriented
super-
markets
high-
end
Number of stores
29
172
6
37
147
7
Ave. travel distance (miles)
9.02
8.87
16.96
8.74
9.54
14.45
Share of trips
19.32%
79.46%
1.21%
21.47%
78.11%
0.43%
Organic% in total trips
0.27%
0.78%
25.07%
0.80%
1.38%
35.07%
Share of spending
18.49%
79.69%
1.81%
21.34%
78.01%
0.64%
Organic% in total spending
0.32%
0.96%
21.91%
1.02%
1.66%
29.99%
Pricing & Discount
Price index (selected basket)
0.968
1
1.505
0.919
0.929
1.373
Organic PI (selected basket)
0.977
1
1.357
1.046
1.039
1.449
% discount (overall)
12.81%
40.12%
11.69%
10.25%
35.99%
9.51%
% discount (organics)
0.05%
0.29%
4.06%
0.08%
0.43%
3.42%
Broadness & Depth of Assortments
Ave. broadness (# UPCs) per store
2038
1505
659
1557
1517
201
Organic% in total broadness
0.79%
2.28%
25.84%
1.35%
3.62%
31.84%
Ave. variety per category
33.98
63.72
9.07
32.86
57.78
4.68
Organic% in variety
7.47%
8.35%
49.54%
8.91%
10.52%
61.03%
Table 2. The Retailer Profile, 2005-2008
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