About PlateCost

What this site is

PlateCost turns USDA wholesale food price reports into pages you can actually read, plus calculators that run on the same numbers. It's built for people who buy food for a living: independent restaurant operators, caterers, food truck owners, anyone who needs to know what eggs, butter, cheese, or cream cost this week at the wholesale level.

We pull data from USDA AMS Market News through the MARS API. Specifically:

• National shell egg reports
• The CME cash dairy weekly recap, covering butter, cheese, nonfat dry milk, and dry whey
• The Northeast fluid cream report

Every data page names its source report and the date we retrieved it. We don't summarize numbers from memory or estimate them. If a page shows a price, it came from a specific USDA report on a specific day, and we tell you which one.

The calculators use those same figures. If you're trying to work out what a batch of buttercream or a case of eggs costs you at current wholesale rates, the math runs on live data, not on numbers we typed in once and forgot to update.

What this site is not

PlateCost is not a grocery price tracker. These are wholesale prices, the rates that move between processors, distributors, and large buyers. They are not what you'd pay at a retail store, and they don't reflect the markup that shows up on a shelf. If you're comparing our numbers to what you saw at the supermarket, they will not match. That's expected, not a bug.

This site is also not procurement advice. We don't tell you which supplier to use, when to lock in a contract, or how to negotiate a price. We show you what the market reported. What you do with that number, whether you buy now or wait, is a business decision that depends on your volume, your contracts, and your relationships with suppliers. We're not in a position to make that call for you, and we wouldn't try.

Wholesale markets move for reasons that don't always make it into a headline: seasonal supply shifts, feed costs, export demand, weather events, disease outbreaks in poultry or dairy herds. We don't editorialize on causes we can't verify. When a page explains a price move, it sticks to what the USDA report itself says.

Why we built it this way

Small kitchens don't have a commodities desk. Most people running a restaurant or a food truck don't have time to dig through USDA report PDFs every week to figure out if butter is trending up or down. We built PlateCost because that information already exists, in public reports, but it's not formatted for someone trying to plan next month's menu costs between prep shifts.

So we did the boring work: pulling the reports, attributing them properly, and building calculators that use current numbers instead of static ones. The goal is a reference you can check in a minute, not a research project.

Who's behind it

PlateCost is run by Das Creative LLC, a small US data operation that builds pipelines on public data. We don't sell food, we don't broker deals, and we don't have a stake in which way prices move. We just try to get the reporting right and keep the attribution honest on every page.

If something looks off, or a source date seems stale, that's worth telling us. Accuracy on this site depends on catching that kind of thing early.