About Risk and Route

Risk and Route tracks how disruptions to global maritime shipping affect the prices consumers pay for everyday goods and commodities. We combine real-time vessel tracking data, commodity futures, Federal Reserve economic indicators, and geopolitical event monitoring into a single interactive dashboard, paired with proprietary indices and human-reviewed analysis.

No existing product does this systematically. FreightWaves covers logistics for industry professionals. MarineTraffic tracks vessels for commodity traders. Bloomberg and the WSJ write about shipping's consumer impact reactively during crises. Nobody provides continuous, consumer-facing analysis connecting what happens on the ocean to what happens at the grocery store.

Our Approach

We publish proprietary indices — the Route Disruption Index, Household Fuel Risk Index, and Chokepoint Severity Scores — that estimate how maritime disruptions transmit into specific consumer categories over time, with uncertainty ranges. We don't just show ship dots on a map. We build transmission models that connect shipping delays to your grocery bill.

Transparency

Our data sources are public and documented on our Methodology page. Our index formulas are published. Our Forecast Scorecard tracks what we predicted versus what actually happened, because accountability matters more than appearing infallible.

Our Process

Risk and Route uses proprietary methodologies to collect, analyze, and synthesize data from public APIs across vessel tracking, commodity markets, economic indicators, and geopolitical event monitoring. Every analysis article is reviewed and edited before publication. Our indices are computed algorithmically from documented formulas.