4-29 FB Food Marketing

Recently, the USDA's Economic Research Service issued a new report in its Food Dollar series, which "measures annual expenditures on domestically produced food by individuals living in the United States and provides a detailed answer to the question 'For what do our food dollars pay?'"  The report slices the Food Dollar three different ways, to shed light on “different aspects of evolving supply chain relationships.”

The most straightforward data set shows that in typical dollar’s worth of US-produced food, 84.2 cents pays for food marketing, while just 15.8 cents is spent on the raw farm commodities themselves. So only about16 cents to the farm where the food was produced, with the remainder being spent on ‘food marketing’. "Food marketing," in the USDA's definition, is not limited to advertising: It refers to the entire system that links farms to consumers, including transportation, processing, and distribution. In other words, this means that we spend five times as much on getting our food from farm to table as we do on actually growing it.