Filet Mignon Price Snapshot

Population. Portioned filet mignon from farm-direct and national DTC sellers who ship into the farm's territory, normalized to $/lb from the stated pack weight. Whole tenderloin and wagyu/A5 are tracked but reported separately, for reasons below.

No commodity benchmark exists for this cut. The ground beef index anchors to a BLS/FRED retail series; BLS publishes no filet mignon or tenderloin series, so there is no national average to compare against. The peer population is the only anchor here, which is arguably the more useful one anyway.

Two pricing conventions collide. Farms usually sell catch-weight at a printed $/lb; national DTC sells fixed-weight portions at a fixed ticket. Where a listing prints a per-pound rate that rate is used as-is and never divided by an average weight. Ground beef rarely exposes this because it is almost always a flat 1 lb pack.

No price was estimated. A listing with no stated weight yields no $/lb and is excluded rather than approximated.

Harvested from the 90 sellers already mapped for the ground beef index, read directly from each store's own catalogue (Shopify, WooCommerce, GrazeCart and schema.org JSON-LD) rather than from search results.

Roughly a third of sellers carry no filet at all, and 35% of tracked listings are sold out (192 of 549). There are only two tenderloins per animal. A competitor's absence from this page is usually scarcity, not a pricing decision, and a median taken over whatever is listed on one day is less stable for this cut than for ground beef.

29 listings carry a price but no published weight and are therefore excluded from every statistic. Ten stores expose neither a catalogue API nor a sitemap and are not represented.

Only 181 of 549 listings could be placed geographically, so the regional breakdown below covers a subset and is indicative rather than decisive.

Portioning is labour, and several farms sell the whole tenderloin cheaper per pound than their own portioned filets. The two are never pooled here. Across 61 tracked whole tenderloins the median is $90.91/lb (range $13.00–$266.63).

Shipley's are $50.80 (Proper Meats) and $63.70 (Signature) — both below that median. Note the attribute model below finds whole tenderloin carries a positive coefficient once pack size is controlled for: the raw per-pound discount is a size effect, not a verdict on the cut.

Each listing was coded for the grade and production claims it states, then regressed on log price per pound. The table reports the effect of advertising a claim, holding the others, pack size and cut form constant.

Ordinary least squares on log price per pound, n=549 listings, adjusted R² 0.55 — grade, breed claims and pack size together explain about 55% of the price variation in this cut, far more than the equivalent model explains for ground beef. Standard errors are heteroskedasticity-robust; an effect is reported only where the 95% interval excludes zero.

These coefficients measure claims, not practices. A farm whose cattle are grass-fed but whose listing never says so is coded as not claiming it, because that is what a shopper comparing two listings sees.

The contrast with ground beef is the interesting part. Grass-fed earns a premium in the ground beef index and a discount here. At the luxury end this market pays for marbling — Prime, wagyu — and a grass-fed claim signals a leaner steak. The same word is worth opposite amounts in the two cuts.

Move the slider to place a price against the distribution above. Volume and revenue use a constant-elasticity demand curve, Q/Q₀ = (P/P₀)^ε, anchored on the Proper Meats Filet Mignon at $59.50. Both are shown as percentage changes from today, not absolute units.

Treat ε as an assumption, not a measurement. Published benchmarks bracket the plausible range; which value applies to any given operation cannot be read off historical sales records, because routine price changes are entangled with channel mix, seasonality and category-wide cost inflation. It has to be established by a deliberate, time-boxed price test.

Category-level and brand-level elasticities are different quantities: the category figure says how much beef people buy when all beef gets dearer; the brand figure says how many switch away from one seller. A single farm faces something closer to the brand figure. Note also that "luxury good" in economics means income elasticity above 1 — a statement about recession exposure, not price insensitivity.

Add any price to the chart above — a channel rate, a contract price, a target, a quote.

Nothing you type here is saved or sent anywhere. Reference lines live in this browser tab only: not written into the page, not stored on the server, not kept in the dataset. Reload and they are gone. That is deliberate, so a confidential number can go on the chart without existing outside your screen.

Read the position carefully. This distribution is portioned retail filet. A wholesale or contract rate does not compete in that population, so its percentile measures the gap between channels, not competitive standing.

A standing record of what this dataset establishes, what it cannot answer, and what to collect next, so each refresh is read against the same questions.

• Two markets, one product. PS9B33 sits at the 73rd percentile of farm-direct filet and the 19th of national DTC. Both are true; which matters depends on where the customer is.
• Grade dominates this cut. The attribute model explains 55% of price variation here versus about 18% for ground beef. Prime, wagyu and A5 are what the market trades on.
• Grass-fed reverses sign between cuts — a premium in ground beef, a discount in filet.
• Scarcity is structural. Two tenderloins per animal, a third of sellers carrying none, 35% of listings sold out.

• Does the sold-out rate move seasonally, or is the premium tier chronically short?
• Are the 29 listings that publish no weight priced differently from those that do? If so, every statistic here carries a selection bias.
• What is the true demand response to price? Only a deliberate test answers it.
• Do whole tenderloin and portioned filet move together, or can they be priced independently?

• Repeat snapshots on a fixed cadence — the only route to trend and to separating scarcity from pricing.
• The ten stores with neither catalogue API nor sitemap.
• Grade for the listings that state none, which would tighten the model further.