kadoa-org/food-price-monitor

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Summary

The US Food Price Monitor is a static website that tracks daily USDA food price data for around 290 commodities, covering shipping point, wholesale, and retail ad prices. Built with React, Vite, and plain SVG without a chart library or backend, the repository holds the site code while a separate Kadoa pipeline handles data collection and publishes exports to a CDN. The live site is available at kadoa.com/food-prices.

What it is useful for

This project is useful for engineers who need a working example of a data-driven, prerendered static site that consumes an external dataset. It demonstrates how to build a chart-heavy interface with plain SVG instead of a dedicated charting library, and it shows a pattern for reading pre-built data exports from a CDN during development. The dataset covers shipping point prices from Idaho Falls and Fresno, wholesale prices at six terminal markets (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia), shell eggs in New York and a national index, and weekly supermarket ad prices by region for produce, eggs, and meat. Most commodities have two years of daily history, while onions and potatoes have seven years. Each chart includes four-week and year-over-year change alongside the previous years' range.

How engineers can use it

The README documents local setup using Bun:

bun install
DATA_SOURCE=cdn bun run dev   # http://127.0.0.1:5188/food-prices/
bun test

With DATA_SOURCE=cdn, the dev server reads the published data from the CDN, so the site runs without access to the dataset pipeline. DATA_SOURCE=cdn bun run build prerenders every page into dist/food-prices. The README also documents bun run data and bun run publish for rebuilding and publishing data, but states these require FOOD_PRICES_DATASET_DIR and Bunny credentials and are only used by Kadoa.

A documented limitation is that the data pipeline code is not public yet; this repository only contains the site. Engineers looking to modify data collection will need to wait for the pipeline code to be released or build their own equivalent. The USDA source data is public domain, and the project code is MIT licensed.