User documentation

Abstract

Store-level weights for the Circana (formerly IRI) InfoScan data allow researchers to develop projections from the retail stores currently included in the data purchased by the Economic Research Service (ERS) to the population of stores in the United States. Circana prepares the InfoScan datasets from data provided by retail establishments across the United States that have agreed to provide weekly retail sales data (revenue and quantity) for products with Universal Product Codes (UPCs) and random-weight products. The types of stores covered include grocery, drug, convenience, mass merchandiser, club, dollar, and defense commissary stores. Circana provides some of the InfoScan data to ERS at the store level, but in cases where the retailers did not approve release of their data at the store level, Circana provides the data at the retailer marketing area (RMA) level. Unlike the Consumer Network household scanner data purchased by ERS, Circana does not provide weights for stores in the InfoScan data.

The importance of weights was recently highlighted in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM’s) report A Consumer Food Data System for 2030 and Beyond (see Recommendation 4.9). Store-level weights can be used in a wide variety of research projects to calculate sales quantity, sales value, or other estimates that are representative of the population of stores. The store-level weights are useful because they allow analysts to create population estimates of sales quantity and sales value for foods and beverages at the national level or for major metropolitan areas. Without weights, estimates would underrepresent the total quantities or values.

The purpose of this report is to describe the approach and results of developing weights and replicate weights (which can be used for variance estimation) for stores in InfoScan for 2012 through 2020 and provide a user’s guide. This report will be updated in the future to include weights and replicate weights for future years.

A previous version of this report (dated 2021) covered the years 2012 to 2018 and did not include discussion of the replicate weights.

Contract No. GS-00F-354CA, Tasks 6 and 7: Final Report