Has consumer food demand become more price sensitive? A case study of beverages using retail- and household-based scanner data

Have consumers become more price sensitive in light of elevated food inflation in the post-pandemic era? This study uses beverages, a large category of food expenditure in the United States, as a case study to examine whether consumers shifted consumption from national brands to cheaper PLs or had higher price elasticities of demand for these products. We draw on near “real-time” brand-level beverage sales data from Circana’s Liquid Data Unify platform for retail scanner data. We find little evidence that consumers' price sensitivity increased in the post-pandemic era.