For Packaged Food: Use Gro's Custom Price Index Application to Track Ingredient Level Inflation

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Weather and climate impacts, trade restrictions, and supply chain disruptions are driving ingredient prices higher, negatively impacting manufacturers’ margins and consumers’ wallets.

We created the Gro Intelligence Custom Price Index Application to help manufacturers better manage their margins and their underlying costs, as well as compare product specific costs to competitor and industry averages. 

To date, Gro has partnered with customers to help them better understand their cost of production today, historically and into the future on an ingredient by ingredient basis. 

This application lets manufacturers create a price index that is tailored to a specific product’s key ingredients and weightings using data (including historical context). With a more granular view into a product’s ingredient costs, procurement, pricing, and hedging teams can make purchasing and product formulation decisions that factor in the most up-to-date, ingredient-level production cost data. Marketing teams can use our new application’s outputs to optimize product marketing strategies and strategy teams can use the application for competitive analysis.

This chart from Gro's Custom Price Index application shows the composite price index for ingredients used in making frosted strawberry pastry tarts (blue line) since 2017, compared with broader inflationary measures, including the Gro US Food Price Index (orange).

The Gro Custom Price Index Application can aid planning by providing a more granular view of input costs. Unlike typical in-house solutions, which rely on ingredient costs at a high level, the Gro Custom Price Indices leverage supply-side data to give an ingredient-by-ingredient picture of costs. 

Our application also lets users benchmark their products against the national averages of local cash price data on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (depending on source); current monthly estimates are revised daily. 

Gro’s US Food Price Index is modeled off consumer spending on food such as grains, vegetable oils, fresh produce, proteins, etc… Gro’s China Ag Index and US Ag Index are based on official government inflation indices. Combined - or used separately - these indices enable greater insight into a product’s production costs, while also offering users more clarity on how what is going on in the broader economy might be affecting their bottom line.

This application provides:

  • Historical context - computes pricing at user set input and weightings levels, so users can see  a breakdown of daily product production costs over the course of the year and over time.
  • Wider price series - Gro is the only platform that has a database that includes 1 million different price series across the globe, addressing a wide range of commodities and ingredients. 
  • Reimagined product formulation - by leveraging the in-app comparison price indices of Gro’s US Food Price Index, Gro China Ag Index, and/or Gro US Ag Index, users can compare prices and experiment with tweaking a product’s ingredients.

For packaged food companies, the application's weightings can facilitate ingredient cost monitoring and management.

Gro’s Custom Price Index Application offers an unequaled set of proprietary data and modeling frameworks that can supplement a customer’s own retail and wholesale sales data (price and volumes) or the retail and wholesale price data that a customer is getting from other sources. Our platform has pricing information across multiple inputs, ingredients, and geographies, and our team of research analysts can work with you to create the most useful view of any product in your portfolio. 

For more depth on our inflation coverage, please visit:

Get in touch with our sales team to schedule a demo today. 

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