Vesper  Updates

Fish & Seafood Prices via Undercurrent Partnership

by Vesper Team
New
Data
Partnerships
Fish & Seafood

Over 2,000 Fish & Seafood price series are now available on the Vesper platform through an integration with Undercurrent, a specialist seafood data provider.

What's new:

  • 2,000+ price series across 15 product groups within Fish & Seafood

  • Global and regional coverage from a specialist seafood data provider

  • Data accessible through your existing Vesper dashboards

Important: Bring Your Own License Undercurrent data requires an active Undercurrent subscription. If you already subscribe to Undercurrent, contact your Customer Success Manager to activate access within Vesper. This model lets you view your Undercurrent data alongside all your other commodity benchmarks in one platform.

Why this matters: Seafood markets are among the most fragmented and volatile in food commodities. Prices vary by species, origin, catch method, and season. That makes it difficult to track costs or compare supplier quotes with any confidence. With Undercurrent data in Vesper, teams across procurement, finance, and category management can check quotes, compare prices, and track trends for fish and seafood. All in the same workflow you use for other commodities.

How to access? Contact your Customer Success Manager at [email protected] to activate Undercurrent data on your account.

New US data partner: Sosland Publishing

by Vesper Team
New
Data
Partnerships
Oils & Fats
Grains & Feed
Sugar & Sweeteners
Cocoa

Vesper has partnered with Sosland Publishing to bring 114 weekly spot price series into the platform. Sosland is a leading US trade publisher covering food ingredient markets.

What's new:

  • 114 weekly spot price series from Sosland, now live
  • Coverage spans four commodity categories: Oils & Fats, Grains & Feed, Sugar, and Cocoa
  • All series are weekly frequency, reflecting US spot market conditions
  • A second batch covering forward cash prices and basis prices is planned for Q2 2026

Why this matters:

Sosland prices are widely referenced by buyers and sellers in North American ingredient trade. Having them in Vesper means you can compare US spot prices directly against European benchmarks in a single view. For categories like cocoa, oils, and grains where US and EU prices regularly diverge, that cross-regional visibility matters in negotiations.

How to Use It:

  • Prices Widget: search Sosland series by commodity or keyword
  • Price Comparison: set up US vs EU price comparisons for the same commodity
  • Cost Models: use Sosland weekly prices as inputs alongside existing European series

How to access?

Add to new or existing dashboards using the search function, or contact your Customer Success Manager at [email protected].

Bring Your Own Data (BYOD)

by Vesper Team, Product Marketing
New
Vesper Toolbox
Data
Cost Models

Upload your own budgets, purchase prices, and supplier quotes directly into Vesper. Your internal data now lives alongside global market intelligence, all in one place.

What's new

  • Add your own data via manual entry or CSV upload

  • Store budgets, contract prices, supplier quotes, or any internal pricing data

  • Unlimited series and products with no caps on what you can bring in

  • All your uploads organized in a new dedicated "Your Data" section

  • Access your data in the Prices widget, Price Comparison, and Cost Models

  • Use the full Vesper toolbox on your own data: visualize spreads, calculate averages, and add notes directly in graphs

  • Use your data as inputs for cost models and custom formulas

Why this matters

Vesper already lets you build custom benchmarks using formulas and cost models. Now you can go further. Bring in your actual purchase history, budget targets, and supplier offers to see the full picture.

  • Track performance: Compare what you paid against what the market did

  • Spot opportunities: See where your prices diverge from benchmarks over time

  • Centralize everything: Stop toggling between spreadsheets and Vesper. Make it your single source of truth.

Your data stays yours

Everything you upload is siloed, secure, and never shared with other users or used in any Vesper Price Index. Your competitive information remains private.

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Cost models in Price comparison

by Vesper Team, Product Marketing
New
Vesper Toolbox
Cost Models
Data
Vesper Price Index (VPI)

You can now compare your cost models directly against actual prices and other cost models in the Price Comparison widget.

What's new

  • Cost models now appear as selectable series in the Price Comparison widget

  • Select cost models from the product dropdown, labeled with their cost model name

  • View cost model historical data alongside multiple other cost models, price series, or any combination of both

  • Same visualization and interaction as product prices (line charts, tooltips, trends)

  • Note: Notes cannot be added to cost models

Why this matters

For finished goods, this bridges cost modeling and price analysis:

  • Compare different recipe options to find the most cost-effective formulation

  • Validate actual paid prices against theoretical cost models to spot inefficiencies

  • Track variance trends over time to identify negotiation opportunities

For commodity and ingredient buyers, this opens up new ways to analyze contract structures:

  • Build indices for weighted baskets and compare against other indices or your own prices

  • Model multiplier or fixed cost-plus structures on top of any benchmark

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New Vesper Price Index: Shea Butter & Derivatives

by Feiko Keilholz, Product Marketing
New
Cocoa
Oils & Fats
Chocolate, Confectionery & Ice Cream
Vesper Price Index (VPI)

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.

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Cost Model Forecast & Collaboration

by Vesper Team, Product Marketing
New
Cost Models
Forecasting & Outlook
AI

Vesper has launched Advanced Cost Model Collaboration & Forecasting, transforming how procurement teams build, share, and predict product costs. These features eliminate silos between team members and bring AI-powered forecasting directly into your cost models, enabling real-time collaboration on forward-looking procurement strategies.

What's New:

  • Cost Model Forecasting: View your total product costs up to 12 months ahead (depending on forecast availability). Toggle between historical and forecasted values with full accuracy calculations, detailed forecast tables showing price movements per ingredient, and weighted accuracy scores.

  • Cost Model Sharing: Share any cost model across your organization with granular access controls. Grant view-only permissions for stakeholder reviews or edit access for joint development, with all shared models appearing in a dedicated library.

  • Cost Model Collaboration: Work collaboratively on shared models with real-time updates visible to all collaborators. Receive notifications when colleagues share models or make edits, ensuring alignment on the latest cost structures.

Why It Matters: Cost models trapped in individual spreadsheets create bottlenecks and duplicate work. Meanwhile, static historical data leaves teams reactive rather than proactive. This update enables procurement teams to collaborate on living cost models that look forward, not only backward, turning isolated analysis into coordinated teamwork with visibility into future cost drivers.

How to Use It:

  1. Access forecasting by clicking the toggle in any cost model widget to switch between historical and forecast views

  2. Share models by selecting "Edit" in the cost model widget, then using the share option under "Access"

  3. Set permissions as either "Can view" for stakeholder visibility or "Can edit" for collaborative development

  4. Find shared models in the dedicated section of your cost model dropdown, marked with company models

  5. Monitor changes through the Notifications banner for updates on shared models

How to access? These features are live for all Vesper users. Contact your customer success manager at [email protected] for training on maximizing collaboration workflows.

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Shipping and Freight Transport Prices

by Vesper Team, Product Marketing
New
Energy & Transport
Data
Partnerships

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].

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Cost Models: Turn commodity benchmarks into product pricing

by Vesper Team
New
Food Manufacturing
Retail
Cost Models

Summary: Vesper has launched Cost Models, a powerful new feature that transforms individual commodity benchmarks into complete product cost insights. This capability allows food manufacturers to combine weighted commodity benchmarks with standardized non-ingredient costs to build accurate product pricing models, delivering unprecedented visibility into true product economics.

What's New:

  • Build complete product cost models by combining multiple commodity benchmarks with precise weightings

  • Access industry-standard non-ingredient costs (labor, manufacturing, overhead) specific to your region

  • Choose from our template library for common food products or create custom models

  • Track how each component contributes to your total product cost with automatic updates whenever source prices change

Why It Matters: With record-high volatility across food commodities, understanding how ingredient changes impact finished products is critical for maintaining margins. Cost Models provide complete cost structure visibility for your entire organization: procurement teams can verify supplier price increases, finance can track margin impacts across product portfolios, and sales teams can justify price adjustments to customers with independently verified data. Non-ingredient costs can represent up to 47% of total product costs—a critical component that's now visible alongside your commodity benchmarks.

How to Use It:

  1. Access Cost Models through the main dashboard menu

  2. Choose between starting with a template or building a model from scratch

  3. Select ingredients from your available commodities and assign precise weightings

  4. Add country-specific non-ingredient costs by selecting your industry and location

  5. Save your model to track cost evolution over time as prices update automatically

Related Features: Cost Models integrates seamlessly with Vesper's existing capabilities:

  • Individual commodity price benchmarks (VPI, Partner prices, and Public benchmarks found in prices widgets)

  • Incorporate into your own custom dashboards

  • Coming in Q3 2025: Forecasting capabilities for your cost models

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Shea Butter Crude VPI Benchmark

by Vesper Team
New
Oils & Fats
Chocolate, Confectionery & Ice Cream
Data
Vesper Price Index (VPI)

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

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