Food Prices Keep Rising, Businesses Adapt to Digital, & CPG Exports Increase | Beige Book Highlights Dec. 2nd, 2020

How is the American economy doing? According to the Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, economic expansion has been moderate and optimism is waning, but what about the CPG industry specifically?  The Beige Book is a Federal Reserve System publication that collects mostly qualitative information, gathered directly from District sources. This consumer data creates an opportunity to characterize dynamics and identify emerging trends in the economy that may not be readily apparent in the available quantitative economic data. Additionally, most CPG businesses today are offered nationally through e-commerce or large brick and mortar retail chains, so it’s important to understand that America is not a one-size-fits-all economy, especially during the coronavirus.   Because of that, the Beige Book can potentially help you with regional insights that can be applied to create advantages in your business. To save you time from reading the whole document that comes out every 45 days, I started a content series that takes five CPG industry related highlights that I found most insightful from the latest Beige Book, such as indications of out of stocks in grocery stores again and e-commerce continues to see pressure on the logistics side around holiday shopping, with the goal of sharing it along with some additional commentary on how it could potentially impact you.   On Vol.4 of the CPG industry Beige Book, I also wanted provided some additional bonus quantitative private industry data on the 2020 Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Digital Sales performance from Adobe Analytics and Salesforce.