It's hard to believe, but the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) has been conducted every month now for three years. I've been fortunate to have Susan Murray working with me to make it happen every month and to have funding support from DASNR, the Willard Sparks Endowment, and the USDA NIFA competitive grant program, AFRI.

We've pulled together a summary of trends in key survey question we've asked for the past three years.

Overall, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for most meat products has been down this year compared to last year, partly reflecting (I suspect) lower overall meat prices. Here are relative changes in WTP where May 2013=100 for steak, chicken breast, and pork chops.

We also ask people their expectations about increases in prices of beef, pork, and chicken. Here is the trend in future price expectations for beef. Except for last month, expectations have been lower this year compared to last (consistent with the fact that retail prices have declined).

Expectations of Future Beef Price Increases

Here is the trend in awareness and concern for the four top concern issues tracked in our survey (May 2015=100). There was a big spike in awareness of E. Coli in the news in November and December, which coincided with the Chipotle outbreak. Pay attention to the units on the vertical axes. As might be expected, awareness of these four items in the news is much more volatile than is concern.

Finally, here are the % of respondents each month who say they are on food stamps, are vegetarian, or say they had food poisoning in the past month. For comparison purposes, note that USDA data suggests 22.3 million households are on food stamps, and the Census Bureau indicates there are roughly 116 million households in the US, which implies about 19% of households are on food stamps.

If you want to compare to previous years, check out the First Year and Second Year reviews.

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