How the index is built.

What it is

A fixed-weight (Laspeyres-style) price index over ten commodity categories, weighted to approximate what a representative independent full-service restaurant spends across those ten categories. It is published monthly, in index points, with 2024-01 = 100.

Why your supplier invoice can differ

A national retail observation and a restaurant purchase answer different questions. The invoice reflects your product specification, pack, order quantity, delivery terms, location and date. BLS describes its average prices as retail estimates; its average-price data exclude shipping, handling and delivery charges. Read the BLS average-price method before treating a benchmark as a comparable purchase.

For example, a hypothetical $66 case containing six 4 lb packs costs $2.75 per purchased pound before any excluded charges. At an assumed 90% usable yield it costs about $3.0556 per usable pound. Neither number can be inferred from an index point or an estimated wholesale range. Use the supplier comparison calculator with your own packs and the invoice checklist before updating recipe costs.

Preserve the source observation month separately from the page retrieval date. Missing or stale source observations remain missing or stale; a newer page visit does not make the underlying price current. An estimated range must retain its estimate label and is not a supplier quote.

Source data

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Price Data (AP), U.S. city average, monthly, not seasonally adjusted. Retrieved through the BLS public data API. The exact series identifiers:

Each category links to its own page, where that series' full monthly history sits next to what a move in it does to a plate.

The calculation

• — Base period: 2024-01 = 100. It is the first month for which all ten series have complete data.
• — Weights are fixed. The point of a fixed-weight index is that movement comes from prices, not from re-weighting. If we ever change them we will say so here, on this page, with the date and the reason.
• — Missing observations are dropped, never interpolated. BLS marks unavailable months explicitly; several 2025 months are missing from these series due to the lapse in appropriations. A month is only included in the index when every one of the ten categories has a real observation for it.
• — Contributions shown under “what moved” are each category's share of the 12-month index change, in index points. They sum to the total change, which makes them an attribution rather than a ranking of percentage movers.

Update and revision policy

• — The pipeline refreshes weekly. BLS publishes these series monthly, so most refreshes change nothing.
• — When BLS revises a historical observation, we take the revision. Published index values may therefore change. We do not keep a frozen vintage.
• — If a series is retired or its identifier changes, we will document the substitution here rather than silently splice a different series into the history.
• — If any contributing series lacks measured data, the index is not published at all — the page says so instead of showing an estimate. That rule is enforced by a test, not by discipline.

Licence and citation

The index, the charts and the derived data are published under CC BY 4.0. Reuse them anywhere, including commercially, with attribution and a link. No permission needed, no form. The underlying BLS data is a US government work and is in the public domain.

Machine-readable: CSV · JSON. Both carry the full index history plus every underlying monthly price. Journalists and researchers: we're happy to answer questions about the construction — press@marji.co.