COVID-19 Working Paper: Shares of Commodity Consumption at Home, Restaurants, Fast Food Places, Schools, and Other Away-from-Home Places: 2013-16

A better understanding of commodity consumption will help government and businesses to address the Nation’s deficiency in meeting Federal dietary guidelines and the effectiveness of commodity promotion and educational efforts. The data on commodity consumption by food source can be used to gauge adverse impacts on the agricultural commodity sectors when access to commercial eating places is limited due to COVID-19 restrictions. To this end, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007-08 Food Intakes Converted to Retail Commodities Database (FICRCD) is supplemented with imputed values for new foods and applied to 2013-16 What We Eat in America (WWEIA) survey data to convert food consumption into commodity consumption. The data then is broken down into two broad categories—food at home and food away from home. Food away from home is further divided into four sources—a restaurant with waiter service (restaurant), fast food establishment (fast food), school cafeteria and daycare center (school), and other away-from-home places (others). While this approximation meets immediate data needs, developing FICRCD for 2013-16 is recommended as the statistically preferred approach to convert food consumption data into commodity consumption by source