Methodology & data

ShelfVelo is a free index, powered by Tastewise — the AI food-intelligence platform trusted by teams at Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Kroger. It ranks the fastest-selling and fastest-growing grocery and convenience-store products in the US so CPG teams can spot demand shifts early.

Where the data comes from

ShelfVelo is built on the “recently sold” signal that a major delivery platform surfaces on convenience & grocery store menus. We track a fixed panel of 12 US stores (including Walgreens, CVS, Wawa, DashMart, Total Wine & More) across daily snapshots, parse each store's recently-sold products, and normalize brands and categories into a consistent taxonomy.

How velocity is measured

The delivery platform reports “recently sold” as a coarse, left-censored bracket (“50+”, “300+”, up to “6.6k+”) — a floor, not an exact count. So we never publish precise unit sales. Instead we convert each bracket into an ordinal velocity tier and combine it with store coverage (how broadly a product is selling across the panel) into a 0–100 velocity index, normalized within each department so categories compare fairly.

How momentum is measured

Momentum is computed per product within each store first — controlling for the fact that which stores are scraped varies day to day — using a robust (Theil–Sen) trend of the velocity tier over time, then aggregated across stores. We report momentum as a direction(Surging, Rising, Steady, Cooling, Falling), not a precise percentage, and only call something “surging” or “falling” when stores agree and coverage is sufficient.

Brands, categories & alcohol

Brands are extracted from product names using a curated dictionary plus heuristics; brand-level pages only appear when our confidence is high. Categories are mapped to a clean taxonomy, and alcohol is kept as its own clearly-separated vertical so it never distorts the food & beverage view.

Limitations you should know

• It is a delivery-channel sample from a single delivery platform, not a national retail census.
• The panel is small and non-random (a fixed set of stores), so read it as a demand signal, not market share.
• “Recently sold” is a coarse bracket — momentum is directional, not exact.
• Roughly 1 in 7 recently-sold rows have no product name and are counted toward category velocity but not shown as products.
• There is no geographic breakdown yet — all figures are national-panel.

We surface these caveats on every page on purpose: transparency is what makes the data trustworthy and citable.

Questions or want the underlying analysis for your category? Talk to a Tastewise analyst.