In 2024, U.S. farm establishments received 18.5 cents of every dollar consumers spent on food at home, such as groceries, but only 7.1 cents of every dollar spent on food away from home, such as restaurant meals, the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in a Chart of Note published on 14 May 2026. The route food takes from the farm to the plate decides how much of the consumer's dollar comes back to the farmer. The chart was prepared by ERS economists James Chandler Zachary and Quinton Baker.
How the food dollar is split
The ERS Food Dollar divides consumer food spending into two parts. The farm share is what farm establishments earn from selling the farm commodities linked to that food. The rest is the marketing share: payments for processing, transporting, storing, wholesaling, retailing and the other activities that carry food from the farm gate to the point of purchase.
In 2024 the marketing share was 81.5 cents per food-at-home dollar and 92.9 cents per food-away-from-home dollar. ERS explains that the marketing share is higher for food away from home because of the added costs of preparing and serving meals at outlets such as restaurants and schools.
Spending moves from the kitchen to the restaurant
The summary of the Food Dollar update that ERS released on 10 March 2026 put the farm share for all food at 11.8 cents per dollar in 2024, down from 12.1 cents in 2023. Over the same year the food-at-home farm share edged up from 18.4 to 18.5 cents, while the food-away-from-home farm share fell from 7.5 to 7.1 cents.
For domestically produced food, spending on food away from home rose 4.2 percent in 2024 to $1.27 trillion, while food-at-home spending grew 1.4 percent to $901 billion. ERS notes that farmers receive a lower share of food-away-from-home spending because food in that channel goes through additional processing and transportation before it is sold. The food services industry group, which includes restaurants, supplied 38.6 cents of value added per food dollar in 2024, 1.1 cents more than in 2023.
ERS food expenditure figures show that U.S. consumers, businesses and government entities spent $2.58 trillion on food in 2024, and that food away from home reached a high of 58.9 percent of total food expenditures.
Shares differ by product, and the method is new
The Food Dollar splits food-at-home spending into 28 product accounts. According to ERS, fresh fruits and fresh vegetables generally carry higher farm shares because they need little processing compared with canned, frozen and dried fruits and vegetables.
The 2026 update comprehensively revised the Food Dollar model and its data sources, and ERS cautions that results from the new model are not directly comparable with earlier releases. The definition of food now also covers bottled water, soft drinks, coffee and tea. Because their supply chains use relatively few farm commodities, the broader definition lowers the all-food farm share for 2024 from 12.3 cents to 11.8 cents. The data behind the chart are in the ERS Food Dollar data product and were discussed in a recorded webinar.
ERS, established in 1961, is a USDA agency and a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System. It provides economic research and information to inform public and private decisions on agriculture, food, natural resources and rural America.
Photo: MatthewHoobin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sources: USDA Economic Research Service (Chart of Note; Food Dollar summary findings; Ag and Food Statistics: Charting the Essentials), Wikipedia
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