By many measures the price of food is on the rise. Let’s discuss some charts.
The price of food away from home closely track the PPI. And the PPI shows rising pressure on prices.
CPI Food Index Levels at Home vs Away
From January 2021 through December 2022, the trend line slope of the increase in food at home vs away was similar, on average.
Starting 2023, the price of food at home nearly flatlined through August of 2024 in contrast to the price of food away from home.
I attribute the difference to strongly rising minimum wages and staff shortages that impacted restaurants more than grocery stores. But the past few months show rising pressure on groceries as well.
CPI Five Food Categories Year-Over-Year
Year-over-year, the price of food at home generally bottomed in late 2023 or early 2024.
In particular, the year-over-year price of Meat, Fish, Poultry and Eggs category jumped from -0.9 percent to 4.2 percent.
Cattle Futures
CPI Spotlight on Food
CPI Month-Over-Month Food
Food at Home vs Away from Home Month-Over-Month
- Between February of 2023 and August of 2024, the price of food at home rose no more than 0.20 percent. The average monthly increase in that period was 0.06 percent.
- Between February of 2023 and August of 2024, the price of food away from home rose at least 0.4 percent on 11 occasions. The average monthly increase in that period was 0.40 percent.
In the last four months starting September, the price of food at home has gone up 0.4, 0.1, 0.5, and 0.3 percent. This also corresponds to the lead PPI chart.
Food at Home vs Away From Home Since January 2023
Food Inflation Appears Poised to Rise
The year-over-year price of food is 1.8 percent. It may decline in January of 2025 due to a very easy comparison (green highlight 0.4 percent).
But starting February, the month-over-month comparisons will be very difficult to beat regardless of producer prices.
If the PPI is strong, food away from home will see upward pressure month-over-month even if year over-year numbers moderate.
Regardless, what matters most are the indexes and month-over-month numbers and those bottoms seem to be set.
CPI Jumps 0.4 Percent in December, Markets Giddy Anyway
For analysis of the overall CPI, please see CPI Jumps 0.4 Percent in December, Markets Giddy Anyway
The Markets are pleased with a CPI report that isn’t that great. Here are the details.
January 14, 2025: A Mostly Good PPI Report With Easy Year-Over-Year Comparisons Coming UP
The Producer Price Index (PPI) for services was unchanged in December but the price of goods jumped 0.6 percent.
Final demand services is about 67 percent of the index. This is why services at 0.0 percent and goods at 0.6 percent resulted in a change of 0.2 percent.
If services remain benign, the Fed would be happy with the tradeoff of goods vs services.
Learn to love brussel sprouts.
The price ($2.99/lb) has not changed at all in over 4 years.
I love brussel sprouts but I only buy when they are under $1.99/.lb. We also buy them here as they come from the farm, on a tree. I believe I have seen these at $5-6 but I don’t know how many lbs I could get off of one of those. I might buy one to check next time I run into one.
A couple of years ago I stocked up for prepping and bought many pounds of dry pasta and several packages of tomato powder. So today I made caramelized tomato sauce with fresh garlic and olive oil and tossed cooked pasta in it, and served it with nutritional yeast (which actually tastes better than parmesan) and cooked fresh broccoli. It was good.
We need an overhaul of our food industry. There are a handful of middlemen, the very large distributors, that take most of the profit from both ends.
We run $600 – $800 per month for the two of us.
My wife and I run about $350/mo.
Local Safeway has broccoli crowns at 97 cents/lb this week (members only). Although broccoli is usually pretty cheap around me. I usually pay no more than $1.99/lb. Another store (Luck) has cherries @ $3.99/lb.
Like KGB above, I have a circuit of 6-9 stores that I move between to get the best deals.
Mish,
The rise in food prices seems to be happening in a lot of countries at the same time.
Japan has seen food prices increases as a result of bad weather and reduced catches of seafood along with the huge increases in related costs such as energy. Some of the increases there are ridiculous. Even rice has soared in price.
Next, Australia…..
Yeah, Australia, that energy and agriculture powerhouse that has seen huge increases in food and energy prices.
Went to the grocery store yesterday and here are some of the prices I paid in Australian dollars:
Salmon fillets: $44 per kilo
Chicken Drumsticks: $4 per kilo
Butter: $16 per kilo
Olive oil: $13 per liter (half price on sale)
Eggplant: $7.90 per kilo
Watermelon $2.50 per kilo
Green Peppers:$7.90 per kilo
Cucumber – One long green type $2.90
Eggs -1 dozen: $5.90
Milk: $3 for 2 liters (store brand crap – higher quality milk is over $4 a liter)
I didn’t buy cabbage as it was $7.90 a head and passed on a box of store brand cookies at $6.50 a box ($5.50 last week with a notice saying chocolate prices went up….same box a year ago was $4.50)
Didn’t buy spuds as we’ll be eating those from the vegetable garden for the next six months or so. ($4.90 a kilo). We are also eating cherries from our trees ( now frozen). We had a reasonable harvest this year and gave a lot away even though we had a bunch ruined by mould when it suddenly turned hot and humid. $17.50 a kilo in the store for fresh in season. IIRC we picked around 25 kilos.
I had to go to two different grocery stores as one was out of eggs, peppers, and cucumbers (limit of two packs of eggs as we have an egg shortage here too) and those were the price of cage eggs. Barn laid or free range are much higher.
Grocery stores are also cutting back on the number of people they hire and when they hire them. I used to go shopping in the morning as soon as the stores would open as they were almost always fully stocked when the doors opened. Now if you go at that time you’ll find a lot of empty shelves. Go later in the morning around 10 and you’ll see people stocking the shelves.
Lots of food products here are imported. Shrimp, fish, garlic, canned goods, etc. A we are a small market when trouble happens we see it. A while back one of the companies that made cottage cheese went out of business so none in stores for months.
And I don’t recall anything ever going down in price to what it was years ago either.
$100 US is equivalent to $161.27 Australian $ as of 1/16/25 in Australia.
Yes, and at one time during the mining boom $100 US was worth $90 Australian…..
The Australian dollar is very volatile and given that companies here have tied themselves to China the outlook for the future isn’t looking too good.
Maybe we’ll see mid 50’s or lower when China crashes.
Climate change.
Sure, it’s been cold and cool in most growing areas and that is why production and quality is down. I used to be able to grow musk melon and watermelon, but no longer can
How can there be average increases of 0.4% monthly but 1.8% annually?
By by my reckoning, that’s almost 5% annually.
I shop eight grocery stores on a five mile circuit because each store has one of my staples at a competitive price. The range of prices is double or triple the low price. I marvel at the wealthy housewives who are oblivious and price insensitive. Their job is spending his money. Wife is a good job if you can ‘get it’.
How much time and gas do you spend circling the various stores? If you spend a gallon or two of gas and 1 extra hr of time traveling you need to be saving 50+ dollars on your weekly bill to make it worth it.
The circuit is sixty to ninety minutes. @25mpg the gas is less than half a gallon’s worth.
But how much is your time worth since I presume you are using your free time to do this and not your company time (ie you aren’t being paid to do this)?
I value my free time highly.
i mean there are a lot people, like pensioners that dont have much to do. they need something to fill up their day.
Some of us have nothing but free time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEj8lUx0gwY
My mantra is “never marry a housewife”. In my view, they are parasites. I’ve been with my wife for 40 years and she has always expected to pay her own way. Respect!
Along the same line, we bought a used car this last weekend. Every dealer except Genesis charges anywhere from 1200 – 4000 in added dealer fees. In addition to the price of the car and taxes. New Kias now have ‘market adjustments’ of 5k. Nope, not gonna do it.
Used car market is VERY hot right now. The reason is that most of the cars that people want are the 3 year old models. Problem is 3 years ago very few cars were made since it was the middle of Covid.
So the problem of new car shortages 3 years ago leading to ‘extra’ dealer fees has now moved to the used car market. It will be another 2-3 years before the effects of 20-22 car market due to Covid works its way through the system.
Our restaurant (and outside the home coffee/tea consumption) visits are way down. It’s downright offensive to pay $3-4 for a cup of coffee. The fancy drinks are now $7-9. Nope, not gonna do it. And if you’re a restaurant charging $20 for a salad, you won’t see me more than once.
Caffeine pills. $2.99 or so. 200mg for each pill equals a cup of strong coffee.
I live in Brazil.
Supposedly there is 5% inflation here.
However my money all comes from the USA.
In the past 6 months the traders in NYC and London have drivel the Brazil currency down by 25%. What that means to me is that I now get 28% more Reais for the same Dollars.
In other words, food is cheaper than it was last year. By a lot.
Last Sunday the wife and I went to a distinguished country restaurant serving well-cooked traditional food, baked free-range chicken, rice, fried iping (akin to french fries), a salad, feijoada (something like chili with ham, its traditional in Bahia) and beer, along with genuinely friendly service.. The total tab for both of us, including tip, was 80 Reais, now equivalent to US $13.33.
You can keep on complaining or you can move, its your choice……
Do you speak fluent Portuguese? I imagine most people on this web site do not.
Your fellow Brazilians are complaining.
Don’t you see?
Dungeness crab season just opened hereabouts. I’ve read that fresh crab off the boat is now selling at $12/lb! Wasn’t too many years back when that price was $4 or under.
Love Dungeness Crab but there is no way I’m paying 12/lb
Let’s get those rates back up, Powell!
Stop eating! — Joe Biden
I understood cattle herd sizes are currently no bigger than the 1960’s while the US population during this time has doubled.
No 2 ways about it the price will have to go up a lot to bring herd sizes up.
It’s death by a 1000 cuts. The climate “hoax” leads to loss in crops due to flooding, freezing, fire, drought but also the growth of pests and disease. Then the labor shortage “hoax” sends all the immigrants packing and now there’s no one to work the meat packing plants or the farms or the places in between.
Finally, the distribution systems break down when there aren’t enough farmers producing, warehouses/truckers delivering, and grocers shelving. Take a wild guess at the cause here. Got stock piles of food?
We’ll have plenty of people complaining about how things were better back in the old days though, we’ll have plenty of those jerks.
Only 4.5 days for the journey to the promised land….
“Finally, the distribution systems break down when there aren’t enough farmers producing,”
Family farms have been largely driven out of business by policies that started in the 1960s. Corporate farms require corporate labor which means all the employees get paid the going rate so labor costs naturally go up.
The corporate farms got the cities cheap food, and that is what they wanted. If that dynamic has played out then the options are find a discrete way to bring back slavery or build a robot that can pick strawberries or cucumbers or cut lettuce etc.
The trouble is that if there are ever any facts that disagree with your narrative, they are hidden otherwise the narrative could be challenged. There are countries in the world where food security is just fine, and the export food, and their population is stable.
The labour shortage issues are to do with training and investment in people, not the sun, the weather, or a sky pixie. Lack of development in the hotter parts of the world, has always been to do with corruption, EU blocking imports, and China’s loansharking and exploitation.
…but don’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative, there’s a lot more free money to be made from selling “carbon credits”.
Are you planning on dying or are you moving to Jerusalem?
Lets add this up … the commodity complex is very often NOT to blame as rice-corn-wheat-soybeans (half of most food) rarely are surging in price (if you look at the CRB graphs), and those base materials only make up 3% of the price of food anyway. So a lot of the cost of food is the $100k+ salaried employees in the food companies who value-add. And with fewer companies in total due to Covid wiping them out, and the lack of competition with fewer companies, Im thinking that whoever we think is to blame for higher food prices would be off the hook if we just would stand to the side and let the market fix things. We’d be back to normal before you could say “crony capitalism.”
Buy dried lentils. They cook quickly. Beans take longer to soak and cook, so canned is more convenient. I buy as much as I can at Aldi and go to other places selectively. Whole Foods is reasonable for greens – kale etc.
I hate beans.
Aldi in Chicago very popular-
https://www.fox32chicago.com/video/1576189
Last week our Aldi had eggs for $4.53 a dozen – limit 2.
Costco is usually 2 doz for $5.99 hereabouts. Used to be $4.99 before the latest bird flu scare.
They keep killing the chickens, millions of them, to prevent the bird flu but it doesn’t work. Sheese.
I’m in New England, and I just paid over $3dz for the first time about a month ago. It crept up to close to $4 a couple weeks ago, but I paid under $3 again finally, this week. It has hovered between $2-$3 for the past 6 months before that.
Trader Joe had eggs at $3.49.
Instead of buying expensive ready to eat boxes of cereal (e.g.Corn Chex), try cooking some quinoa. A 4.5 lb bag of organic quinoa costs $9.99 at Costco and is good for about 32 servings. It also provides a complete protein.
I don’t eat cereal (except oatmeal), but I also don’t do Costco. It’s full of libs and the management is a bunch of libs.
Inflation is the one issue no politician survives. If it is detected = gone.
Just paid $9.87 for 18 eggs at our local discount grocer. Yeah, I know, bird flu, etc., but my local USDA farm services rep tells me the input costs for farmers have spiraled out of control. As bad as restaurant has become, food prices at home have risen significantly. My wife and I keep it simple. Minimum processed brand name foods and if you don’t know now, LEARN TO COOK. My wife is passionate about good food and cooking and is amazingly skilled. Point is you have to make it yourself. It’s still expensive but better. Proteins are the biggest challenge – even cheap cuts are expensive these days.
Cooking at home should be from scratch, not boxed and frozen food. Taste better and cheaper.
Its very hard when there is only 1 or 2 of you (single or empty nest couple) to cook from scratch. Not only does it eat a lot of time (at least 2 hrs when you consider the prep, cooking and cleaning time) but you often waste a lot of food because it’s all but impossible to buy 1 or 2 chicken breasts so you have to buy a pack of 6 or more and then either cook them all or somehow separate into smaller portions etc.
I had that problem until last year, when we bought our first “Air Fryer” I have grown to love chicken tenders. I get them consistently at 2.75-3.25 a Lb. In packs of 12-15 for under $10. I grab 3-4 packs and clean them all up and then add some oil and seasoning and bag and tag them for meals in the freezer. They thaw nicely the day before too.
There’s only my husband and I. We freeze leftovers to have two dinners or lunch. My husband grills large packages of chicken. We cut up and freeze to make other dishes, casseroles and soup. We buy a large prime rib roast. We cook and have a steak dinner. We cut up the rest and freeze for a lot of delicious meals. (fajitas, mini baked steak burritos, beef stroganoff, cheesesteak stuffed peppers, etc.)
I use frozen organic strawberries and blueberries with them as the only ingredient, for my smoothies.
High input costs .. were the chickens demanding more money?
Farm rep wasn’t speaking to eggs but overall ag, fuel, labor, fertilizer, feed, all way up.
WTF. Where are you shopping and where do you live?
I got a dozen eggs at Aldi this weekend for $4.85 which is 7.27 for 18.
Walmart sells 60 packs for 21.97 or 4.39 a dozen or 6.58 for 18.
Southern Oregon, Medford. Recent spike in egg prices here, especially for Willamette eggs. Not buying 60 packs for 2 people.
We only have one grocery store in the area. There is also a health food store but only rich folks can afford to shop there.
We don’t buy any packaged/prepared foods at all. We do buy high quality eggs, of which we eat a lot. The pastel yellow yolks of commercially produced eggs and their super runny texture throughout makes us choose the expensive eggs instead…just like the farm-fresh eggs I was raised on 60 years ago.
In the high inflation 1970s there were stories of senior citizens eating canned cat food because they couldn’t afford tuna. Nowadays? Cat food is so expensive, they’re eating the cats.
I think you’ve confused Haitians for Senior Citizens.
As a price-aware grocery shopper for years, the numbers I see are ridiculously high. I oftenn say, out loud in the aisle, “who is paying that for that”. Yesterday I bought olive oil and paid 2x its previous price. However, as your earlier post points out, we just subtract them off in many of the Fed-centric inflation measurements, the same Fed that undercounts the massive increase in home prices. We are being gamed and abused. The reason the Fed often ignored food prices in many measures in the past was that they were more volatile, like fuel. I don’t see much falling back on prices these days yet the adjustment that assumes they are volatile persists. I’ve always wanted to subtract food and fuel from my budget too…’cept i can’t.
If there’s no change in course, the anger seen up to and leading to the Nov 5th outcome will only get worse and I don’t think policmakers are going to like an asset-happy crowd vs millions of getting-unhappier assetless mob. They, asset holders themselves, are gonna be in one pickle after another. Things are going to only get hotter if the willingness to force prices lower isn’t found. I wonder if they’ll ever act against their own self interest in their assets to drive prices lower. Paging Paul Voelcker.
Let the market rally onward. My grocery market basket says that I’m deploying less and less to the non-grocery discretionary items some of those market participants are selling, including their stocks.
My robots can carry rifles, and keep the serfs in their place. I’m not worried.
Are you also President of England? Asking for a friend.
That would be Prime Minister, and I’m working on it.
Why not King Soros?
Soros is little people.
You are a serf.
I am your God.
Here in NJ, restaurant pricing is way up. For a lunch sandwich, prices went from $8 to $12. For dinner, entrees went from $27 to $37 to $45. Used to be a couple of two could have an Italian dinner without drinks and no desert for $120. Now it costs $200-$250. I have been frequenting the same places for 20 years, so I know.
But you’ve stopped going now, considering their unfair pricing? Or are you their willing Huckleberry? Trying to figure out how they will approach their future pricing and this feedback is critical in the process.
Huckleberries are what Make America GRRRRRRRREAT!
I don’t go out as much and am more selective about where I go and what I order. Some of the things, like buying a hamburger that used to cost $6 and now costs $11, I rarely do. I can bring my own lunch and save time and money.
But too many don’t understand that a business can raise the same revenue selling 4 units at $10/each or 2 units at $20/each.
The 2 unit model requires less overhead and therefore generates more profit.
When you pay employees by the hour rather than by the amount produced it doesn’t matter whether they make 2 or 4 units in an hour, the overhead is the same. This also applies to the rent for the building, insurance, taxes etc. In other words fixed costs don’t change.
But in this case, the cost of food will be less and the dining experience will be better because the servers and cooks will not be so rushed.
In the end, the proprietor will make a greater profit and have happier customers.
Of course, this implies that your potential customers are willing to pay the higher price that you are charging.
If entrees are 45 and there are 2 of you, the cost is at most 90 without drinks/desert. How are you getting to 200-250?
Also most places at least here in Florida offer happy hour pricing or daily specials on appetizers, food, drinks. If you are going out you should be looking to take advantage of that as we very rarely go out to a place that doesn’t have a special.
4 Manhattans each at $13.95
Sounds cheap…..when I was in Japan meals at hotels would run around 30,000 yen each. At 75 yen per US dollar that was US$300 per person. Add in dessert and coffee, taxi fare, babysitting gift (cakes or Japanese sweets)for the mother-in-law and you were talking close to US$1000 for the experience.
Two entrees – $90, Two appetizers – $60, Two sparkling waters 0.75L – $20, Two coffees – $12. $182 before tip of 20%. $218.
Crazy. Unless the tap water is unfit to drink I think I’d skip the sparkling water and the coffees (you can get cheaper and better coffee at a McDonalds drive thru on the way home).
Out of curiosity, how big are the portions? The misses and I are in our mid to late 50s now and we can’t eat 2 apps + 2 entrees any more. Often 1 app and 1 entree shared is plenty for us at least at Florida restaurant portions.
Tap water really isn’t that great here. It smells of chlorine. Most places, the portions are decent. Sometimes we will take some home, but generally not. We occasionally will split something, but that means we both have to want the same thing. We used to go out two times a week. Now we generally go to one nice dinner a week and one take out. Eating out is a luxury, but it is something we both enjoy, and it breaks up the week.
How much of that dinner cost at those Italian restaurants goes to the mob for their cut?
NJ best Italian food in the USA. We used to get comped to free meals in the AC casinos but instead drove about 10 miles to small town and paid for really great food. 4 people $66 for dinner no alcohol but with desert. The good old days of the 90’s.