I wanted to dig down on that a bit (not disagreeing though). Pork, both in default and sale prices hasn’t changed that much since my 2020 shopping days. Chicken has probably gone up by @Dinsdale 's 29% or even more, but part of that is even the default cuts available tend to be higher quality than what I was seeing commonly five years ago - to wit, the cold meat case from the live counter is only Red Bird products, and so it is at least in part an apples to oranges question.
Beef? Well, there have been lots of reasons for the increases there. I do remember seeing ground beef at $3.00 a pound pre-Covid (though even then that a sale price IIRC), but even my historical “cheap” beef-steak cut of top sirloin was around $5.00 or more a pound then (also on sale).
But how/where you shop, as stated upthread is also a big part of things. These days I buy most of my chicken in big packs from Costco at $2.99lb (freezing most of it), while the Red Bird stuff in the case at the store today was $6.99 a pound.
Correct. Every dollar shifting from Safeway to Costco or Lidl is 10-15% deflation that no one recognizes as deflation. And then Safeway has to raise prices because they are losing share in the high volume SKUs and need to carry 50,000 items to be competitive. But on the wide assortment side they can’t compete with Amazon who can carry literally a million SKUs. So they go into Safeway and are SHOCKED that Aluminum Free Baking Soda is $7.99 and Kleenex is 2.99. When only 20% of baking powder is bough my from a full-line grocery store any more. And only 5% of paper products.
And people don’t want white bread coming from a factory in plastic bags that has a shelf life of ten days. They want something that LOOKS like it came from a bakery. And the. They compare the Wonder Bread knock-off that was $0.69 in 2005 with the Labrea Bakery stuff that is $5.59 now and say that bread has gone up by eight times in price in five years!
The race of tbe middle class from mainstream groc to Walmart & Costco and the parallel march from mainstream mall department stores to Target and Amazon, and the explosion of cheap i.ported (mostly nonfood) products has hidden a lot of liss of real purchasing power.
My concern is this, kinda like e.g. South Korea’s economic miracle of industrialization, is a one time trick. When wage stagnation and cost increases keep biting & people can’t afford Costco’s groceries or Amazon’s Chinese crappola, what’s their next move?
One thing that was mentioned in passing upthread but maybe not emphasized enough is beef prices. Fortunately I don’t eat a lot of beef just on general principle, but we are no longer in a time when inviting guests over for a prime rib roast entails just a casual shopping trip. It would not be unusual for a quality Angus prime rib roast of decent size to carry a price tag into the three figures. This is not the kind of cost we typically associate with a single food item – more the kind of cost we associate with the purchase of a durable appliance – but it’s today’s reality.
Hard to say. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a year ago. But in fairness, not by much in terms of percentage rises.
I’ve found that if I watch for supermarket sales, I can stock up, and take advantage of savings. Not for everything, such as produce or bakery which are perishable; but canned goods, coffee, and frozen foods, are fair game for stocking up.
Mighty Mouse - could you generally state whether or not the 29% since 19 I cited seems right? And any general idea how that 5-6 year period compares to prior?
Here’s a cite from the official inflation folks on the last 12 months inflation.
Which has some interesting breakdowns within the general category of “food”.
I wasn’t able to find a longer time series, but of course BLS has that data going back decades.
You can play with their CPI calculator here:
June 2025 is the latest data available. June 2019 is a few months before COVID was noticed, and probably a couple months before it began circulating and could have any economic effect whatsoever. The calculator tells us that, for the basket of goods and services that makes up the CPI, $100 then costs $125.93 now. so ~26 percent in 6 years. Which represents about a 3.9% compounded inflation rate.
That is correct nationally. There are regional variations but not large.
The last five years ended a streak of very low food inflation for about 20 years. There has been volatility in the usual suspects (beef, poultry, dairy) but no year at anything near 10%, and many years of zero or negative food inflation.
Between 2000 and 2019 food prices rose a cumulative 40%, between 2019 and 2025 almost 30% on a national basis.
Regular prices at your Safeway or Winn Dixie may well have risen more than this. But that is balanced out by:
more promotions, including weekly specials, but increasingly richer loyalty programs and personalized offers
shift of volume to Walmart, Target, Aldi, Costco and a bunch of regional no-frills places
Prices paid may also be higher because consumers expect some things now, but don’t think they should pay more for:
free (or subsidized) pickup and deliver services. These are either subsidized by marking up the prices on the website (Instacart’s business model) or the retailer having to charge EVERYONE higher prices.
higher quality and more customization. Free from ingredient X, Y and/or Z. Angus beef. Traceable supply chain. Cruelty free poultry and pork. Multigrain breads.
These are things that are causing grocery bills to rise faster than pure inflation.
When I refer to food inflation, I’m generally talking about the Food at Home numbers I linked to. They are the closest representation of the prices the average consumer sees wherever they buy food to consume at home, aka they “grocery bill”
That’s a great cite to the St. Louis Fed data. Thank you. Definitely worth a click through for all of us to see the full-sized graph.
As you’ve said, there was a major lull in food price inflation for about 20 years. And then it picked up significantly in the last few years.
What I’ll point out is that right now, total inflation to date since e.g. 1975 = 50 years ago (!) is just about a straight line. What has happened in the last 5 years made up for what didn’t happen in the preceding 20.
We can’t say that future food price inflation will return to that long term trend; it might flatten out again, or might keep rising more steeply.
But for sure anyone much under the age 45 now of came of age during the great lull in food price inflation. And now that it’s back in force, those folks are shocked.
, I’d say coffee whitener (I think you say coffee creamer in the US) and sodas. For me it is now genuinely a considered purchase whether to buy a 2L bottle of name brand coke. Here in the UK the price of sodas basically doubled overnight.
I like the occasional bagel with cream cheese. Cream cheese has, for some reason, been very expensive since Covid. Philly is about $4.69 a block at our (locally owned) grocery. Costco the other day had a 6-pack for $10.99. How is that possible and why wouldn’t the local store go and buy the maximum allowed? Certainly plenty of restaurateurs in Costco.
Here in the Majikal Land O’ Cheese Friday night fish fries are a staple of life.
I’ve noticed that many places replaced cod (an already inexpensive fish) on their all you can eat menu with pollock, an even cheaper fish.
And the prices have jumped. AYCE was $7.99-$8.99 in 2019. Last night I paid $13.99 at the same place it was $7.99 at in 2019. And it’s not the same fish.
“Zest” means something specific in cooking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to mean something specific on an ingredient label, which is why this one is phrased oddly (and vaguely).
Zest is the very outer rind of a citrus fruit, and it adds a lot of flavor to baked goods, jams, and even some stews. The small holes on a four-faced grater are for grating zest, but you can buy special tools just for it as well. You can buy packaged zest, usually called something like “granulated lemon peel” if you use a lot, and don’t like lemonade, but fresh is better, and most recipes don’t call for much.
Citrus fruits can be tropically grown, but not exclusively. Exclusively tropical fruits can have edible peels, but aren’t generally spoken of as having “zest.”
Apparently, though, woo medicine refers to a supposed “digestive aid” and “anti-inflammatory” as “zest” when it includes celery juice, ginger, and tropical juice. Some recipes include turmeric.
So I’m going to guess you have mostly celery juice (well, mostly water); but then some kind of tropical juice(s) in small amounts; some citrus zest, non-specific, so they can use what is cheapest-- there could be etrog zest:
but no one associates that with summer and fun like lemon- or limeade; ginger; possibly turmeric; and probably a small amount of sweetener.
I can agree with that. And all the sale prices I see are something stupid like “…When you buy five cases”. These days I just buy a six pack of fancy soda as a treat now and then but otherwise don’t keep soda at home.
$6.99 for a 12 pack of soda? I can get a 12 pack of el cheapo beer for $5.99. It takes more effort and time to make beer (even the cheap stuff) than soda.
Yesterday I saw 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi for $2.99. The store brand is normally $1.25 but was on sale for 99 cents. I can afford anything I want but guess which I bought?
The $7/lb price for 80/20 ground beef threw me the other day. Obvs I hadn’t been shopping for that when I’ve been in a regular grocery (as in, not Costco)…
