The objective of processed food inventories is to develop a quick sense for (a) the range of processed foods available for sale at retail in urban markets, and (b) the number and relative prevalence of companies and products that are (i) manufactured locally, (ii) imported from regional neighbors, and (iii) imported from the “world market.”1 The emphasis is on numbers of products and companies; no attempt is made to estimate volumes. Limiting the objectives in this way allows the work to generate valid data without statistical sampling, which results in much quicker data collection and much lower cost. Typically such an inventory would be done only as the first step in a broader research program that will later collect more detailed quantitative data based on statistical samples.