Leveraging Scanner Data To Understand The Retail Beef Consumer

That Constant Beeping

You’re in the grocery store checkout line and as each item passes over an electronic scanner, you hear that omnipresent beep, beep, beep. Originally adopted in the mid-1970’s to speed up pricing and checkout, the scanner, with its ubiquitous bar code, facilitates retailer inventory management, loyalty cards and couponing, as well.

One additional opportunity, however, has been to consolidate this actual consumer purchase data beyond the store or chain level, and regroup it by product type – to understand that bigger picture market view. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, on behalf of the Beef Checkoff, purchases this data to gain important insight into retail beef sales.

Background

Two companies aggregate and sell retail scanner data, and NCBA purchases retail meat department data on a monthly basis from Information Resources, Inc. (IRI, formerly Freshlook). This data is then cleansed, categorized and formatted via Meat Solutions’ VMMeat System so the checkoff can understand what’s happening with beef and competing proteins in the retail meat case.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: Beef Issues Quarterly