Vesper has expanded its proprietary Shea & Cocoa equivalent fats coverage with 10 new Vesper Price Index (VPI) benchmarks for Shea butter and its derivatives. Published weekly, these benchmarks combine inputs from renowned brokers to bring transparency to one of the most opaque supply chains in the market.

What's New:

• Expanded Shea Coverage: Weekly benchmarks for Crude, Semi-Refined, Handmade, Shea Olein, and Shea Oil across key West African origins (Ghana, Burkina Faso).

• Broad Market Input: Prices derived from renowned brokers, combining inputs from multiple partners to ensure robust and unbiased market representation.

Why It Matters:

Public price transparency for Shea is extremely limited, leaving procurement teams to rely on fragmented signals or single-source quotes. These proprietary VPIs provide the independent reference needed to verify quotes in a notoriously non-transparent market. Especially with Cocoa price movements of the past years, this was a much-requested product from our users

How to Use It:

• Prices Widget: Bookmark specific grades (e.g., Shea Stearin, Crude Shea Butter) for one-click access to the latest weekly prices.

• Price Comparison: Compare different processing stages (e.g., Crude vs. Semi-Refined) to identify value opportunities and spot diverging trends between product types.

• Cost Models: Select these Shea VPIs as ingredients in your Cost Models to forecast the total cost of confectionery, Chocolate or any other formulations using actual market data.

How to access?

Add to new or existing dashboards using the search function, or contact your Customer Success Manager at [email protected] to confirm which specific grades are currently active for your region.

Vesper has expanded its proprietary specialty dairy protein coverage with two new Vesper Price Index (VPI) benchmarks: WPC80 Regular US and WPC80 Regular EU. Published every Wednesday, these benchmarks provide independent, region-specific price visibility, allowing procurement teams to track actual market spreads rather than relying on fixed premium assumptions or generic proxies.

What's New:

• Weekly Regional Benchmarks: Prices for WPC80 Regular in the US and EU, published every Wednesday.

• Verified Market Input: Prices derived from verified active market participants—both buyers and sellers—so you see where trade is actually getting done.

• Deep Specialty Coverage: Strengthens Vesper’s unique position in specialty proteins, joining our existing benchmarks for WPC80 Instant, MPCs, WPI, Caseinates, and other niche protein products.

Why It Matters:

Relying on "80 Instant" for "Regular" WPC80 can hide the actual cost. These new Vesper benchmarks provide the independent reference needed to verify quotes against actual market prices. By establishing a shared view of the market, buyers and sellers can align on price faster, ensuring fair trade and reducing the time spent negotiating over data sources.

How to Use It:

• Prices Widget: Bookmark the US and EU prices for one-click access to the latest Wednesday publication.

• Price Comparison: Compare the new WPC80 Regular prices to the Instant variant and use the Spread function to instantly visualize correlations, spot patterns, and track how the price gap evolves over time.

• Cost Models: Select these new benchmarks as ingredients in your Cost Models to see product costs with WPC80 Regular as an ingredient.

How to access?

These benchmarks are live for all Vesper users with access to the Dairy module. Contact your customer success manager at [email protected] for help integrating these new indices into your dashboard.

Added dedicated news coverage for packaging markets, tracking regulatory developments, sustainability initiatives, and material demand shifts across agricultural supply chains. Our 12th commodity-specific news feed, powered by AI models that filter global outlets to deliver only relevant packaging intelligence.

Why It Matters: Packaging costs can represent 10-30% of total product costs, yet most procurement teams track these markets separately from ingredient intelligence. Policy changes, material innovations, and input cost movements in packaging directly impact your bottom line and product competitiveness.

What's New:

• AI-filtered news from global outlets, eliminating noise

• Global and regional packaging market trends

• Regulatory developments and sustainability initiatives

• Material demand shifts and supply constraints

• View packaging feed individually or combined with all 12 commodity feeds

• Custom keyword notifications

• Direct keyword and region search within the feed

How to Use It:

1. Access Packaging News in your lefthand bar navigation

2. Set up keyword notifications for topics you're tracking

3. Search by keyword or region to find specific developments

Vesper has Expanded Forecast Coverage, adding 1200+ new price forecasts across key commodity categories. This massive expansion adds price outlooks to previously unforecasted products, enabling procurement teams to anticipate price movements across their entire commodity basket—from coffee beans to meat cuts.

What's New:

• 1200+ New Forecasts: Price predictions now available for products that previously showed only historical data

• Multi-Category Coverage: Major expansion across Eggs, Grains, Meats, and Coffee categories

• Enhanced Cost Model Predictions: More ingredients in your cost models now are part of forecasts

• Deeper Market Visibility: Forward-looking insights for specialty and regional products that lacked predictive analytics

Why It Matters: Procurement decisions require forward visibility across all ingredients, not just major commodities. This expansion eliminates forecast gaps that forced teams to make assumptions about future prices. Now, whether you're buying specialty coffee blends or regional meat cuts, you have data-driven predictions to guide purchasing decisions and budget planning.

What's included?

• Eggs: Shell eggs, liquid, and processed egg products

• Grains: Wheat, corn, barley, and specialty grain varieties

• Meats: Beef, pork, and poultry cuts across multiple regions

• Coffee: Arabica, Robusta, and regional blend benchmarks

• 12-month forecast horizons (where data availability permits)

• Automatic integration with existing cost models

Vesper has launched Commodity Shipping Intelligence through an exclusive partnership with Upply, bringing freight rate benchmarks directly into the platform. This integration enables procurement teams to track delivered costs by combining commodity prices with real shipping rates for their specific inbound lanes—creating true landed cost visibility.

What's New:

• Inbound Freight Benchmarks: Real shipping rates for strategic procurement routes, not generic freight indices

• Upply Partnership Integration: Access to validated freight data from one of Europe's leading logistics intelligence providers

• Route-Specific Pricing: Targeted lanes for commodity imports (origin ports to destination factories)

• Multi-Modal Coverage: Ocean freight, road transport, and intermodal combinations where relevant

• Integrated Cost Analysis: Combine commodity prices with freight to calculate true delivered costs

Why It Matters: Commodity prices at origin tell only half the story. With shipping costs representing 10-30% of delivered prices and extreme volatility in freight markets, procurement teams need visibility into both components. This integration transforms Vesper from a commodity price platform into a complete landed cost intelligence system—critical for accurate budgeting and supplier selection.

How to Use It:

1. Search freight routes using origin-destination pairs in the platform search

2. Add to dashboards alongside relevant commodity prices for complete cost tracking

How to access? Freight rates are available to all Vesper users who have access to the Energy and Transport category. For more information, contact [email protected].

Vesper has launched Direct Widget Data Export, streamlining how users extract data from the platform. This feature eliminates the multi-step process of navigating to separate download centers, allowing instant data exports directly from any widget you're viewing—saving valuable time for teams that need to quickly move data into reports, models, or presentations.

What's New:

• One-Click Export: Download data directly from the three-dots menu in any compatible widget

• Instant Access: No need to navigate to Data Download or remember complex product names

• Multi-Widget Support: Works across Prices, Price Forecasts, Production, Import/Export, and Stock widgets

• Format Preservation: Data exports match the exact view and timeframe displayed in your widget

• Simplified Workflow: From insight to Excel in seconds

How to Use It:

1. Navigate to any widget showing the data you need

2. Click the three dots in the top-right corner of the widget

3. Select "Download" from the dropdown menu

4. Access your file immediately in your email inbox

5. Paste into your model or report—formatted and ready to use

How to access? This feature is live for all users with Download data across the platform. No setup required. To get access please reach out to your customer success manager or [email protected]

Vesper has launched Vesper for Excel, a powerful new integration that brings Vesper's live commodity intelligence directly into your spreadsheets. This feature eliminates manual data entry, allowing teams to spend less time maintaining spreadsheets and more time analyzing markets with real-time data feeding directly into the models and templates they already use.

What's New:

• One-Click Refresh: Update all Vesper data in your spreadsheets instantly. With a single click, you can access real-time prices, forecasts, FX rates, and fundamentals.

• Direct Data Access: Pull data from over 160 global sources directly into any cell in your spreadsheet.

• Native Integration: Vesper for Excel lives natively within your Excel, integrating seamlessly with your existing workflow and templates.

• No Coding Required: Perfect for procurement, finance, and sales teams who need live data in spreadsheets without any technical overhead.

Why It Matters: The time spent on manual data collection and entry is time lost on strategic analysis. Vesper for Excel automates this process, ensuring the latest market information always powers your most critical models. It shifts your team's focus from data maintenance to data-driven decision-making.

How to Use It:

1. Download the add-in from the Microsoft Excel marketplace.

2. Log in with your Vesper API Excel key.

3. Set up once by using the Vesper for Excel sidebar to choose the data you need (e.g., commodity, price type, date range).

4. Click "Refresh" at any time to update all data points in your sheet instantly.
   

How to access? Reach out to your customer success manager or [email protected] to learn more about the Excel Add-in or the various options to extract or integrate Vesper data directly into your workflows

What data? Vesper for Excel offers seamless access to Vesper's data:

• Vesper Price Index (VPI)

• Partner and Public price benchmarks

• Forecasts for Price, Production, and Stock levels

• FX rates

• Global trade data

• S&D/Fundamental data

• Stock levels
  

Summary: Vesper has expanded its news coverage with two dedicated categories: Vegetables & Pulses and Fruits. These new sections deliver focused, timely information on fresh produce markets, including harvest conditions, logistics updates, weather disruptions, pricing trends, and market developments.

What's New:

• Dedicated news category for Vegetables & Pulses

• Dedicated news category for Fruits

• Comprehensive coverage of global fresh produce markets

• Integration with existing news filtering and alert capabilities

Why It Matters: Fresh produce represents critical input markets for many of our core users. These new categories significantly deepen our current coverage, which has primarily focused on price benchmarks until now. By adding dedicated news streams, users gain deeper insights and earlier warning signals about market developments before they impact prices. This expanded coverage provides essential visibility into volatile produce markets, helping users anticipate supply disruptions, track pricing pressures, and identify emerging trends. This expansion responds directly to user feedback requesting more comprehensive coverage across the complete ingredient spectrum.

How to Use It:

1. Find the new categories in the News section of the platform

2. Set up custom alerts for specific commodities within these categories

3. Filter news by these categories to focus on produce-specific updates

Related Features: These news categories complement Vesper's existing offerings:

• Smart news filtering and aggregation

• Custom news alerts

• Fruits and Vegetables price benchmarks on the Dashboard

Summary: Vesper has expanded its oils & fats coverage with a new weekly Vesper Price Index (VPI) benchmark for Crude Shea Butter (FOB Tema) from Ghana. This proprietary benchmark, exclusive to Vesper, provides a reliable, independent price reference for an increasingly strategic commodity in food manufacturing.

What's New:

• Weekly VPI price benchmark for Crude Shea Butter

• FOB Tema delivery basis from Ghana—the world's largest shea butter exporting country

• Full integration with existing oils & fats dashboards and pricing tools

Why It Matters: As cocoa prices continue to surge, we've seen increased demand from our user base for alternatives like Shea Butter, which has emerged as a critical cost-effective substitute for cocoa butter. This exclusive VPI benchmark responds directly to user feedback, delivering essential price transparency for those seeking different compositions to limit the effects of cocoa volatility on end product applications. Having Vesper's independent benchmark helps verify supplier pricing and supports more confident negotiations during this period of volatility in cocoa markets.

How to Use It:

1. Find the new Shea Butter (Crude) benchmark in the pricing widgets section

2. Add it to the price comparison widget for side-by-side analysis with cocoa butter prices

3. Incorporate this benchmark into your custom cost models to evaluate how chocolate formulation costs change when substituting with shea butter

4. Monitor weekly updates to identify emerging trends and optimize buying decisions

Related Features: This benchmark complements Vesper's existing offerings:

• Cocoa butter price benchmarks

• Vegetable oil price benchmarks

• Cost modeling for ingredient substitution analysis