Examining Food Store Scanner Data: A Comparison of the IRI InfoScan Data with Other Data Sets, 2008–2012

by David Levin, Danton Noriega, Chris Dicken, Abigail Okrent, Matt Harding, and Michael Lovenheim

USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) has purchased proprietary retail scanner data (InfoScan) since 2008 to examine food policy questions. To determine how representative the data are, this report compares the number of stores and sales revenue reported in the InfoScan data with the same information from other datasets.

Keywords: IRI, InfoScan, scanner data, food expenditures, County Business Patterns, Economic Census, National Establishment and Time Series (NETS), TDLinx, food at home (FAH), food sales

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