Consumer staples had a good year last year, with the S&P500 consumer staples sub index rising 24%. It is also a sector that fares especially well on the alternative data front.  This report is going well and truly back to basics – in multiple senses of the phrase – by gathering data sources from far and wide, to help highlight the options available to consumer staples investors.

Sales & Revenue – CPG brand manufacturers

Point of Sale Data

Point of sale (POS) data is the natural place to start. The point of sale is the time and place where a retail transaction is completed – a POS system is the software used to process a sale, typically using a product code that links to a price and specific SKU (or stock keeping unit).

These product-level sales datasets are aggregated from numerous retail chains by intermediaries (typically large market research firms), who anonymise the contributing retailers and extrapolate total market sales and share values for brand manufacturers.

POS data can, therefore, speaks to all the sub industries of this consumer staples sector, with the one exception of Food & Staples Retailing. This is because, as described above, retailers submit their POS data to aggregators on the condition that it will be anonymised.