Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprises Continue to Struggle | Beige Book Highlights March 3rd, 2021

How is the American economy doing? According to the Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, most businesses remain optimistic regarding the next 6-12 months as economic activity expanded in the first part of 2021, 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 consumer confidence growing in the Middle Atlantic Region, logistics demand is far exceeding supply across all modalities, and minority- and women-owned business enterprises are struggling in comparison to the national average. On CPG industry Beige Book Vol.6, I also provided some additional bonus quantitative January retail data that came from the U.S. Census Bureau and February jobs data from the U.S. Department of Labor.