BBQ Explorer
Weekly price dataMethodology first

The Brisket Index

Version 2 tracks published retail brisket and 20-lb smoker-pellet prices every Monday UTC, and releases on the four most recent accepted observations. No smoothing, backfill, carry-forward, or interpolated gaps: a week that fails is a week that is missing.

Version 1 status — ABORTED

The scheduled August 24 observation failed and was rejected. Version 1 ended with its single accepted August 17 observation; it will not be retried, backfilled, carried forward, or repaired with a substitute retailer. No version 1 release was created.

Machine record: run 32723239257, attempt 1, conclusion failure.

Version 2 — independent weekly series

Observations run every Monday UTC, and a release becomes possible once four accepted snapshots exist. The September 7 observation was rejected when one source’s robots.txt returned a server error, and it is not backfilled; the window simply moves on to the next clean weeks. P7 (Mountain Hardware and Sports) begins as a distinct retailer series; it does not continue historical P5.

  • Brisket, $/lb (headline sources)
    • USD 10.99 /lb — The Meat House Market — Whole Packer Brisket, USDA Top Choice (USDA Top Choice)
    • USD 9.99 /lb — Barth's Market — Brisket, Whole Packer, Prime (USDA Prime)
    • USD 10.49 /lb — Clark's Custom Meat — Brisket Whole (ungraded)
  • Pellets, $/20-lb bag
    • USD 19.99 /20-lb bag — Bear Mountain — Hickory BBQ Wood Pellets
    • USD 12.99 /20-lb bag — Pit Boss — Competition Blend Hardwood Pellets, 20 lb
    • USD 19.99 /20-lb bag — Mountain Hardware and Sports — Traeger Signature Blend, 20 lb (PEL331)
    • USD 19.95 /20-lb bag — Grange Co-op — Traeger Signature Blend, 20 lb (PEL331)
  • Accepted v2 observations
    3 accepted weekly observations (latest: 2026-09-21)

How it works

A fixed basket of published retail prices, re-checked weekly from the same sources on Mondays UTC. The headline $/lb figure is taken from sources that publish an explicit per-pound price in static HTML. Pellet headlines require an explicitly labeled 20-lb bag; band-priced brisket sources are tracked as matched-variant totals and never divided by a midpoint. P7 is a new retailer series for v2 and is never spliced onto P5's v1 history.

Coverage: Published online specialty-retail prices plus separately labeled USDA retail and wholesale context; not a grocery average.

Gaps: Missing values remain missing. No retry, backfill, carry-forward, interpolation, substitution, or pack-size conversion.

Fixed-basket coverage: 12 of 12 ruled sources passed for .

Fixed-basket source coverage — 2026-09-21

Every ruled source is listed here. USDA sources provide context only and do not enter the retail headline.

What it does not measure

USDA wholesale and advertised-retail baselines are retained for context but excluded from the retail headline. Restaurant plate pricing and regional grocery promotions are out of scope. Costco, Walmart, H-E-B, Home Depot, Lowe's, Tractor Supply, and Ace blocked the collector or returned empty shells, so this specialty-retail basket is not a national grocery average.

Accepted-week basket observations — 2026-09-21