How to read a terminal market report

What a market report actually is

A USDA Market News report is a snapshot, not a forecast. A reporter calls or checks trade data for a specific market on a specific day and writes down what buyers and sellers actually agreed to pay. That's it. No modeling, no averages smoothed over a quarter. Just what moved.

Every report has the same basic anatomy, whether it's shell eggs, CME cash dairy, or the Northeast cream report. Once you know the parts, any report on any commodity reads the same way.

The core fields

• Commodity: what's being priced. Large white eggs. Grade AA butter. Nonfat dry milk.
• Grade or spec: the exact product definition. Grade matters because a Grade A egg and an ungraded egg are not the same input for a kitchen, even if they look alike in the carton.
• Market: the geography or exchange the price applies to. A Midwest price and a Northeast price for the same commodity can differ for real reasons: transport, local supply, regional demand.
• Unit: the basis the price is quoted on. Dozen, pound, hundredweight. This is where a lot of confusion happens if you skim.
• Volume: how much product actually traded at that price. Low volume days deserve less weight than high volume days, even if the price number looks the same.

Low, high, and mostly

Most reports don't give you one number. They give you a range: a low and a high, and often a mostly figure sitting inside that range.

The low and high are the outer edges of what actually traded. The mostly is where the bulk of the volume landed. Think of it as the center of gravity, not a simple midpoint. If a range runs wide but the mostly sits near the bottom, that tells you something different than a narrow range with the mostly near the top.

This is why a single average number is worse than useless for kitchen planning. Averages hide the shape of the market. A range with a mostly figure tells you what a typical buyer paid, and how much spread there was around that. If you're pricing a menu, the mostly is usually your working number. The full range tells you how much risk you're carrying if you buy on a bad day.

Why volume changes how you read the range

A range built on heavy trading is a real market. A range built on thin trading is a handful of deals that happened to get reported. Same format, different reliability. Market News reports usually flag light volume, and it's worth checking before you treat a number as representative.

How PlateCost maps these fields

Our data pages pull these fields straight from the MARS API and lay them out the same way every time:

1. Commodity and spec sit at the top, matching USDA's own grade language exactly. We don't rename or simplify grades.
2. Market is labeled clearly, since a national shell egg number and a regional cream number are not interchangeable.
3. Unit is always shown next to the price, not assumed. Dozen versus pound is a common mixup we try to prevent.
4. Low, high, and mostly appear together, never as a single blended number. If USDA reports a mostly, we show it. If they don't, we say so instead of guessing one.
5. Volume, when reported, sits alongside the price so you can judge how much weight to give it.
6. Source report and retrieval date are named on every page, so you can trace any number back to the original USDA release.

None of this is retail pricing. These are wholesale numbers from terminal markets and cash exchanges, meant for people buying at that level or trying to understand where their supplier's costs come from. Read the about page for more on what these reports do and don't tell you.