Lazuli Provides Restaurant POS Data for Waseda University Research, Published in 'Review of Income and Wealth'

Lazuli Inc. (Headquarters: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Seigen Hagiwara), provider of the AI-driven product data platform 'Lazuli PDP', announced that it provided restaurant POS data from approximately 1,000 stores nationwide for research by Professor Kozo Ueda of Waseda University's Faculty of Political Science and Economics. The research results were published on May 7 in the international economic journal 'Review of Income and Wealth'. The paper is titled 'Restaurant Prices: Measuring Service Inflation from Scanner Data'. The study utilized Lazuli's restaurant POS data from 2018 to 2025 to measure service prices, specifically inflation in the dining-out sector. By constructing price, sales volume, and revenue indices based on individual order data, the research conducted a comparative analysis with Japan's Consumer Price Index (CPI). Traditionally, measuring prices in the service sector has been difficult due to the lack of standardized barcodes and significant variations in menu composition, regionality, and store-specific factors. This study demonstrated several insights using Lazuli's POS data: restaurant price indices show high stability across different calculation methods; substitution bias is relatively small; the POS-derived price index has high consistency with Japan's CPI; and a new 'Table Price Index' allows for the identification of 'shrinkflation'. The 'Table Price Index' is a novel approach measuring price fluctuations based on the total expenditure of customer groups rather than individual items. The paper highlights Lazuli's data as 'rare, high-granularity scanner data in the service sector covering detailed order data from approximately 1,000 stores.' The data includes item prices/quantities, number of customers, total table payment, product categories, and store-specific sales data. This enables price analysis based on actual service consumption, which was previously difficult to capture. Professor Ueda praised Lazuli as a company possessing rare restaurant POS scanner data in Japan, capable of organizing data for research, and a partner that has contributed substantially to academic research. Lazuli will continue to support data utilization that contributes to society.