A Study of Weather’s Impact on Consumption of Goods

Abstract: This bachelor thesis in applied mathematics and industrial engineering aims to determine if and how weather affects the consumption of goods at small grocery stores. To study this, we conducted a regression analysis based on sales data from an ICA Nära. We have collected one year’s weather- and sales data and used mathematical statistics to determine how weather affects the sales for different product groups. Our belief is that weather does affect the consumption. Several large actors in the industry have some sort of consumption of goods forecast. None of these takes weather into account when creating their sale forecast. Hopefully, this thesis will provide information aiding companies in deciding whether or not to use weather forecasts as a prediction parameter.  The results indicate a large effect on sales for some groups of products. The regression reveals how much the sale of a group increase along with an increase of one unit of the different measured weather factors. There is, most likely, not a perfect linear relation between our response variable and the explanatory variables. Therefore, one must interpret the results carefully. In addition, we discuss how a possible implementation affects the supply chain of a large grocery store company and the importance of flexibility in one’s supply chain.