Issue 1: October 2026

Issue 0 set the baseline. This issue is the first read against it. It is written for anyone facing a supplier's lobster price claim: an event client with an escalation clause, a planner comparing quotes, a small buyer asked to accept an increase. It reports market evidence. It does not estimate any supplier's cost and draws no conclusion about any contract.

The read

The gap between the lobster and seafood price indexes has widened, and the two now point in opposite directions. The producer price index for lobsters is 1.3% below September 2025. The producer price index for all unprocessed and prepared seafood is 20.1% above it. Over two years the lobster index is down 2.4% and the seafood index is up 31.3%. A supplier who says seafood costs are up a fifth on the year is citing a real published series. It is not a lobster series, and the lobster series went the other way. Neither index settles what a particular supplier paid: the producer price index measures selling prices received by domestic producers, and these commodity indexes exclude imports.

Maine landings and dock prices are the longer story. Landings fell from 132.6 million pounds in 2016 to a preliminary 78.8 million in 2025, down 40.6%, while the annual ex-vessel price rose from $4.08 a pound to $5.85. That is a fact about Maine landed volume and the price paid at the Maine dock. It is not a measure of total market supply, and the long-term decline does not, by itself, establish an increase in any supplier's costs since the original quote. Year over year, the September dock price was 2.1% lower in 2025 than in 2024.

Imports through the Portland, Maine customs district are the one place something moved sharply. August volume was 329,208 kg against 924,011 kg a year earlier, down 64.4%, and the January-to-August total is 14.9% below the same months of 2025, 13.9 million kg against 16.4 million. Declared value did not follow: the average customs value was $9.02 a pound against $9.00, up 0.3%. Less lobster came through, at about the same declared value.

The numbers

Two-year comparisons, where the record allows them: lobster PPI −2.4% against September 2024; seafood PPI +31.3%; food away from home +7.3%. Two other food indexes for the same month, for context: CPI food at home is up 1.8% on the year, and the producer price index for finished consumer foods is down 0.9%.

The explanation

Three measures describe different parts of the lobster market. They cover different populations, dates and product mixes, and nothing in this record establishes that they move together.

The ex-vessel price is what the boat gets at the Maine dock, and the most recent September figure is $6.15 a pound, from 2025 and marked preliminary. Import unit value is the average customs value declared on live lobster entering the Portland, Maine customs district, $9.02 a pound in August 2026; it excludes U.S. duties, international freight and insurance, so it is not a landed cost. At the counter, a single 1.25 lb hard shell ran $18.90 to $19.50 at two Maine sellers, which is $15.12 to $15.60 a pound at the stated minimum weight. The distance between the dock and the counter covers everything that happens in between. This record cannot itemise it or say how it is divided.

Seasonality moves the lobster index more than the year does. In both 2025 and 2026 the index peaked in March, fell to its low in early summer, and rose again into September. The 2026 peak ran above 2025's, 334 in March against 315, a difference of 5.9%. By September the 2026 index stood 1.3% below September 2025. A March-to-October comparison crosses seasons and cannot isolate a year-over-year change.

What the import figures cannot settle is why the volume fell. Lower Canadian volume through one customs district can mean less supply, weaker demand, or lobster routed elsewhere, and this record cannot distinguish them. Maine's own 2026 landings will not be published until early 2027. USDA's Food Price Outlook puts fish and seafood consumer prices 6.5% higher from August 2025 to August 2026, and gives a forecast interval for calendar 2027, against the 2026 average, of −3.8% to 6.6%. USDA does not forecast lobster separately.

The uncertainty

This issue compares each series to the same period a year earlier and, where the record holds it, two years earlier. Month-to-month movement is not in this issue's computed set, so nothing here measures September against August.

The dock price is a year old. The Maine DMR file this issue uses is dated February 6, 2026 and ends with preliminary 2025 data, so the cited public series does not yet include 2026.

August import figures are recent and subject to revision, and trade data for recent months is routinely restated. The year-to-date fall of 14.9% covers eight months and is less sensitive to any single month than the 64.4% August figure. Both remain subject to revision.

The producer price index for lobsters is an index, not a price. Its composition is not published in enough detail to say which products or channels drive it.

The consumer reference is thin, and thinner this month than last. It rests on two sellers, D and G, because only two of the eight sellers observed list a single live hard-shell 1.25 lb lobster. Seller G was observed on both capture dates at $19.50 and did not move. Seller D was observed on October 15 only, at $18.90, which records a price and not a change. Two of the eight sellers yielded comparable live-lobster listings on both October dates, C with 22 series and G with 17, 39 in all, and none changed advertised price. On October 1 the other six yielded nothing: four failed at capture, to one HTTP 403 and three HTTP 429 responses, and two more failed to parse, one of them because the seller served a bot-check page in place of its product list. The listings behind the four capture failures are marked unavailable for that date rather than omitted, and all eight outcomes are recorded in the observation record's flags.

The chain comparison mixes dates. The dock price is September 2025, the import value is August 2026, and the counter price is October 2026. The spread between them is illustrative and is not a margin calculation.

The buyer's question

Ask the supplier three things before accepting a lobster-driven increase.

Which product: live, meat or tail; what size and shell; what grade. These move differently, and a quote for 1.25 lb hard shell cannot be checked against a claim about meat.

Which dates: the date the original quote priced from, and the date the adjustment references. A March-to-October comparison crosses seasons and cannot isolate a year-over-year change.

Which series: the published series or supplier invoice behind the stated increase. If the answer is that seafood prices are up, ask whether the series quoted is the seafood index or the lobster index. Both are free and public, and this month they point in opposite directions.

The record

Sources and retrieval, all October 18, 2026, run 2026-10-18T144903Z:

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, public API v1. PPI commodity indexes WPU02230503 (lobsters), WPU0223 (unprocessed and prepared seafood), WPUFD4111 (finished consumer foods); CPI-U CUUR0000SEFV (food away from home), CUUR0000SAF11 (food at home). Not seasonally adjusted. Latest month September 2026.
• NOAA Fisheries FOSS trade data, imports, HTS 0306320010 (live lobster, Homarus spp.). Value is customs value, which excludes U.S. duties, freight and insurance. Unit value is dollars divided by kilos, converted at 2.20462 lb per kg. Portland, Maine customs district and all districts. Latest month August 2026.
• Maine Department of Marine Resources, Maine Commercial Lobster Landings by month, county and zone, file dated February 6, 2026, 2025 preliminary. Ex-vessel price per pound is value divided by pounds for the month, computed here.
• USDA Economic Research Service, Food Price Outlook, CPI forecast table.
• Field Assembly observation record: advertised prices at eight Maine direct-ship and counter sellers, captured October 1 and October 15, 2026. Sellers appear here as letters A through H. Names and capture rules are on the methodology page. Record commit 80ab303, file hash in evidence.json.

Method: every figure in this issue appears in numbers.json, regenerated from the data files by tools/issue.py. Every capture file, its URL, retrieval time and SHA-256 are listed in evidence.json. Capture files are hashed into an external timestamp chain anchored by RFC 3161 tokens from two timestamp authorities, which show they existed unchanged by the anchor date. An OpenTimestamps proof is stored for this edition's anchor; its Bitcoin attestation is collected by a later upgrade run. An external timestamp shows when a captured record existed. It does not show that a source's figure was correct or that a quoted price was available to every buyer.

Corrections. Version 1.1, revised October 18, 2026. Version 1.0 of this issue gave the prior-year figure in the import row as $8.99 a pound, in the table and in the text. The stored value is 8.995, which rounds to $9.00; the formatter rounded a figure whose exact decimal fell on a half one unit low, and the figure check rounded the same way and so agreed with it. The defect is described in PROVENANCE.md and is fixed in tools/issue.py and tools/check.py. No other figure in this issue changed, and the +0.3% change beside it was computed from unrounded values and was correct in version 1.0.

Two defects in this record's own tooling were also found and fixed before this issue was first computed, and both are described in edition.json: the October 1 observation pass had been cut short by an unhandled parser error, and the computed set could not reach the history this record accumulates for sources that publish one period per report. Neither changed a figure in Issue 0.

Next issue: after the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases October producer price indexes on November 13, 2026.