Home | Keenan Marchesi

About Me

Welcome! My name is Keenan Marchesi, I am an applied microeconomist whose research sits at the intersection of urban economics, health and nutrition policy and industrial organization examining the U.S. food supply chain with a technical expertise in applied and spatial econometrics. I am currently an Economist at Datassential, a global leader in food and beverage intelligence. My research is motivated by the desire to understand the role that food markets play in consumer food choice by examining the way firms and policy interact along the supply chain to influence end behavior among consumers. My work history includes working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, where I successfully furthered our understanding of food markets and consumer food choice, serving as lead author of five government reports and two journal articles, and contributed to several others, published in journals such as Applied Economics Perspective and Policy and Food Security, accumulating 82 total Google Scholar citations across my publications since 2022. This effort established me as a leading expert among agricultural economists in understanding the way non-grocery food retailers interact with each other and consumers across the rural and urban divide. In addition, I served as an expert on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant sector, briefing high ranking USDA officials and preparing briefings documents for The White House on the rapidly shifting conditions of the food service sector. I expanded this work to examine consumer food choice and have continued to advance our understanding of how those initial shocks have reshaped consumers consumption patterns. Further, I have several projects that continue to deepen my research into the urban/rural food environments and the consequences of shifting consumer consumption patterns. Lastly, I have expanded my research to a more holistic view of the US food supply chain, exploring industrial organization and labor markets, that will allow me to continue to establish myself as a voice in the broader food economics and agricultural space, while also expanding our understanding of the intricacies of the food supply chain and food environment. In my spare time, I enjoy continuing my ongoing education in ceramics at my local pottery studio, reading fantasy novels, and spending time with my dog, Chipper.

Recent Publications

Investigating the Lasting Changes in Consumer Food Consumption and Acquisition Since the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 Working Paper: Food-Away-From-Home Acquisition Trends Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dollar store expansion and independent grocery retailer contraction

This paper examines the changes in food-at-home consumption and food-away-from-home consumption and acquisition in the United States from 2019—2024. Exploiting the variation in State-level policy actions and vaccine rollouts, this work provides a longer-term view of altered food consumption and acquisition behavior during and after the pandemic. The most recent period was positively associated with food-at-home consumption and negatively associated with total food-away-from-home consumption, relative to pre-pandemic, driven by changes in acquisition method. Additionally, results show heterogeneity in food-at-home consumption and food-away-from-home acquisition across different groups. This work provides insights on the sustained changes in food consumption since the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing policy responses disrupted how consumers in the US acquired food away from home, and little is known about how they continued to access these goods. This report summarizes national-level trends in dollars consumers spent from December 2019–February 2020 through April–June 2022 at quick-and full-service restaurants by service mode (on-premise, drive-thru, delivery, and carry-out) and acquisition and ordering method. Results show that while on-premises (eating inside a restaurant) spending fell at quick-and full-service restaurants, spending at full-service restaurants remained much lower than pre-pandemic spending levels. We found that consumers quickly adapted to other service modes, like delivery or drive-thru, and this offset many of the losses observed in spending at quick-service restaurants. We also observed that consumers increased spending via cell phone apps for carry-out and delivery orders at both types of restaurants relative to pre-pandemic spending. In short, while consumers’ restaurant spending largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, many of the ways that consumers interacted with quick-and full-service restaurants immediately following the onset of the pandemic remained.

This paper examines the effects of dollar store entry on independent grocery retailers in the United States between 2000 and 2019. We utilized an establishment‐level dataset comprising all grocery retailers and dollar stores in the country. Our findings indicate that dollar store entry is associated with a 5.7% decrease in sales, a 3.7% reduction in employment, and a 2.3% rise in the likelihood of independent grocery retailers quitting the business. These adverse entry effects are three times larger in rural than urban areas. Event studies indicate that the negative impact on sales and employment disappears gradually in urban areas but persists in rural communities. We document differences in treatment effects of dollar store entry across regions, retail formats, and time.