Comparing Food Sector Employment Headcount and Sales Data in the National Establishment Time Series Database to Federal Data

This report offers new information about the accuracy of employee headcounts and sales data in the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database—which provides time-series data on establishments across all sectors, including grocery stores and food service outlets. NETS is frequently and increasingly being used by researchers to answer questions of policy relevance about the dynamics of the food environment at a more localized level. Therefore, it is important to better understand how NETS food retail and service sectors compare relative to similar Federal datasets. This report compares NETS employment headcount with the County Business Patterns (CBP) at the national and State levels from 1998 to 2016 and compares NETS sales with the Food Expenditure Series (FES) at the national level from 1998 to 2019. Findings show that NETS captures similar employment patterns and trends as the CBP at both the national and State levels for most of the food retail and food service sectors. In addition, this report develops a method and presents newly estimated NETS sales numbers that have similar patterns and trends as the FES, enabling researchers to more accurately study food sales at a more localized level.