Consumers report impact of hurricanes Helene and Milton on their food supply

Nearly 21% of households in states heavily affected by hurricanes Helene and Milton report sometimes or often not having enough to eat within the first seven days of the storms’ impact, according to the November 2024 Consumer Food Insights Report (CFI).

The survey-based report out of Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability(CFDAS) assesses food spending, consumer satisfaction and values, support of agricultural and food policies, and trust in information sources. Purdue experts conducted and evaluated the survey, which included 1,200 consumers across the U.S.

“In this edition of the CFI we expanded the survey example to capture more information from consumers who were affected by the recent hurricanes Helene and Milton,” said the report’s lead author, Joseph Balagtas, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue and center director.

“We aim to understand more about how consumers respond to such natural disasters in terms of food access, behaviors and spending.”

To do this, the CFDAS team administered an additional survey to an independent sample of 1,209 consumers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, capturing responses from those who were heavily affected by the storms. These states experienced substantial damage, such as intense flooding and power outages.

“Around one-third of consumers surveyed from these states say they were directly impacted by the storms, whether that be through property damage, evacuation, power loss or food-access issues,” Balagtas said. Most consumers (84%) who were directly impacted by the storms sheltered at home. Around 70% of those who did so stocked up on food items, primarily nonperishables like water, snacks, and canned and boxed foods that don’t require refrigeration.

Many households—52%—impacted by the storms increased their food spending. Survey respondents attributed the increase to factors such as buying extra food in case of shortages (stockpiling), increased food prices, or the need to replace spoiled or damaged food.

“Households that decreased their food spending cite cutting back on nonessential foods and access issues as primary reasons for doing so,” Balagtas said.

The Purdue center’s recent “Chew On This!” blog post explored food grocery shopping and card spending in Florida during Hurricane Ian in 2022. The blog post was based on the work of Purdue research economist Ahmad Wahdat, a co-author of this month’s CFI Report, and Oklahoma State University’s Jayson Lusk.

The results within the “Hurricane Impacts” section of this month’s CFI Report focus primarily on survey responses within the six-state sample. This sample is separate from the nationally representative CFI sample. Other sections of the report compare CFI’s usual measures at the national level with the same measures from the six-state sample.

In attempting to understand the impact of storms on food access, the CFDAS team adopted the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey’s single-question measure of food insufficiency. Food insufficiency refers to households “sometimes” or “often” not having enough to eat. Food insecurity includes the food insufficiency concept, as well as a household’s ability to acquire a variety of quality foods.

A separate survey question asked about having enough to eat but switched the reference period to see how many of the impacted consumers from the six-state sample were still experiencing food insufficiency.

“We found a marked but temporary change in insufficiency from about 20% in the direct aftermath of the storms to about 12% over a month later, which is more in line with what we observe with our monthly measure of national food insecurity,” Balagtas said.

Most consumers who lived outside the storm-affected areas did not make changes to the amount of food their households purchased. “However, we did see some increase in concern about the effects of the storms on food access and availability impacting their households,” he said.

The survey also included questions about governmental response to the storms that came amid the flurry of news coverage, criticism of and rumors about those efforts. Survey respondents were somewhat split in how they rated local, state and federal government efforts to maintain food access for those affected by the hurricanes according to whether or not they lived in the impacted areas.

Most of the consumers directly affected by the storms rated the response efforts with a rating of “good” (32%) or “excellent” (20%). But a larger share of affected consumers also rated the response efforts as “very poor” or “poor” (20%) than those who were not affected.

Overall food spending in November averaged $191 weekly. Among the six-state sample, it reached $14 higher, $205 weekly, which reflected the increase in spending among many hurricane-affected households that stocked up on or replaced food because of the storms, said Elijah Bryant, a survey research analyst at CFDAS and a co-author of the report.

“Both the consumer estimate of food inflation over the past 12 months and expectations for food inflation over the next 12 months saw a decrease this month,” Bryant said. These results followed the November presidential election. Consumers’ inflation expectations dropped from 3.0% in October to 2.5% in November. The latter is the lowest this expectation estimate has been in the lifetime of the CFI survey, which began in January 2022.

“We plan to dig into our food inflation data in the near future to see if any interesting differences due to political affiliation exist,” Bryant said. “Preliminary results from the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers show a shift in consumer expectations and sentiment about the nation’s economy from pre- to post-election based on political affiliation.”

National food security remained relatively unchanged from October at around 13%. Food insecurity in the last 30 days was 17.8% among the representative sample of the six states heavily affected by the hurricanes. Twenty percent of households that were directly impacted by the storms in these six states have struggled with food insecurity in the past month.

“With some states, such as North Carolina, still recovering from the storms, many households were likely still experiencing disruptions to their normal food access late October into November,” Bryant noted.

The Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability is part of Purdue’s Next Moves in agriculture and food systems and uses innovative data analysis shared through user-friendly platforms to improve the food system. In addition to the Consumer Food Insights Report, the center offers a portfolio of online dashboards.