It’s no secret that Americans are feeling the squeeze at the grocery store: With food prices—including grocery stores and restaurants—skyrocketing over the past five years and with potential price hikes on the horizon, let’s take a look at where these higher costs are coming from.

Since January 2019, food prices have risen nearly 30 percent in the US, leaving many households struggling to afford groceries. Grocery prices have been a topic of conversation in homes and the news since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns began, but four years on, the price of food is still making news. While Delish’s detailed infographic will let you wax nostalgic over the cost of groceries the year you were born, interactive tools like CBS’s Price Tracker illustrate how the price of everything—from grapes to electricity to rent—have increased dramatically from 2019. And yet, we’re still left wondering what exactly is sending food prices through the roof. 

The answer, as you might have guessed, is complicated, but it begins with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by consumers for a representative basket of consumer goods and services. The CPI measures inflation as experienced by consumers in their day-to-day living expenses. Below, you’ll see that the CPI for food (US average, in cities) has increased rapidly since the mid-1970s and turned sharply upward during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some cost increases for produce, dairy, pantry staples, and meat are explained by supply chain issues during the pandemic, others by rising transportation costs related to fuel prices. Some foods, like eggs, have increased in price because of shortages related to disease outbreaks, and others, like tomatoes, have seen hurricane-related price spikes. There are also global considerations; the Russia-Ukraine war has increased the costs of some grains and cooking oils, while also creating shortages that impact the prices of goods like bread. Additionally, the costs of agricultural inputs like fertilizer and energy have risen, helping drive the baseline prices of many common foods. There’s inflation, there are labor shortages, grocery store mergers and consolidations, and to top it off, corporate greed is further stacking the deck against everyday consumers. 

Digging in: Some factors that influence grocery prices

While price increases in food—both at grocery stores and in restaurants—are multifactored and constantly fluctuating, some issues can be examined individually to help explain why we’re paying more for our groceries in 2024 than we did in 2019.

COVID-19

The most obvious reason groceries cost more than they did pre-pandemic is that COVID-19 (through safety precautions like lockdowns and staff shortages caused by illness) caused disruptions to supply chains all over the globe. Import prices increased—sometimes as much as 1,000 percent for food goods coming into the US at ports on the West Coast from countries like China—and competition between chains was distorted by larger retailers, which persuaded suppliers to grant them larger allocations of goods in short supply. In short, fewer groceries moved to grocery stores, food and goods cost more to get to stores, many stores were left without adequate stock to accommodate increases in consumer purchases, and subsequently cost more at the register. 

Transportation costs and fuel prices

Fuel costs are a significant factor in food prices in the US. The two are so closely related that, as the USDA notes, consumers buy fewer fresh fruits and vegetables when high fuel costs mean more expensive produce. The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in 2019 was $2.60, with diesel costing around $3.06 per gallon that year; in 2024, the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded was $3.07 and a gallon of diesel is about $3.55. Fuel costs are directly tied to how much retailers charge for groceries and other goods.

Animal diseases, weather events, and crop failures

Diseases can affect food prices more than you might expect. Egg prices, for example, have fluctuated wildly for the past two years, primarily because of avian flu. When bird flu (H5N1) first struck the US in 2022, eggs were priced at around $2 per dozen. They peaked at $4.82/dozen in January 2023, and in December 2024—following the infection of more than 123 million poultry in the US—prices are down to about $2.50 per dozen nationally. You’ll pay more for cage-free, organic, or local eggs, particularly if you live in an area with a higher cost of living than the national average. 

Wheat, which is in everything from bread to pasta to packaged snacks to cereal to crackers, also saw a shortage, thanks in part to the Russia-Ukraine war (more on that later), as well as drought-related shortages in domestic wheat in 2022 and 2023. The 37 percent loss from that growing season is described as “Dust Bowl-like” by researchers, who attributed spring and fall rain shortages to delayed crop growth, decreased crop yield, and increased crop abandonment. Climate change has sweeping, far-reaching effects on the production of all food crops, from grains like wheat and corn to vegetables and fruit, to livestock and poultry.  

Though drought conditions can cause severe shortages in the food supply, so can too much rain. Climate change is responsible for larger, stronger storms that form more frequently but move more slowly, and projections expect these trends to persist. Crops grown in coastal areas, including beef and dairy cattle, poultry, citrus fruit, tomatoes, peppers, grapes, lettuce, almonds, strawberries, carrots, sugar, and even 33 percent of the world’s pecans (grown in Georgia), are vulnerable to bigger, stronger storms that linger longer and dump more water over fields and crop animals. What isn’t washed away is more vulnerable to disease. And with every storm that causes a shortage, the price of that food increases. Researchers estimate that crop losses from Hurricanes Milton and Helene could reach $5 billion, all told.

Global conflict and trade restrictions

Food security across the globe took a hit when Russia invaded Ukraine, which exports wheat, corn, agricultural fertilizer, and oilseeds like sunflower and canola. Russia’s invasion focused on stopping or diminishing Ukraine’s exports by attacking the nation’s agricultural centers, shipping ports, and overland transport routes to neighboring nations. International agreements and humanitarian efforts have eased some of those restrictions, but Russia’s departure from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allows Ukraine to export grain safely through the Black Sea, could cause another rise in grain prices in future months. 

Inflation 

Recovering economically from the COVID-19 pandemic caused inflation in many countries, including the US. Though inflation is reportedly cooling from its peak in 2022, smaller monthly price increases add up quickly. Though recent months have seen lower monthly CPI increases for all food costs (just 0.4 percent in November 2024), the cumulative inflation rate over the past five years is a whopping 23.4 percent. Based on national averages and considering no other factors, like crop failures or import tariffs, a cartful of groceries purchased for $100 in 2019 would cost about $123.40 today. 

Fair pay for food laborers

Very few foods are purchased in their whole, unprocessed state. Even fresh produce—think avocados, bananas, and cucumbers—is picked, washed, sorted, labeled, wrapped, packed into cartons and onto trucks, shipped by land or sea to a distribution point, transported to grocery stores and supermarkets, unpacked, inventoried, displayed for purchase, and scanned at the register by human hands. 

Add drying, pasteurization, packaging, refrigeration, and other considerations for minimally processed foods like dried beans and milk, and you’ve added more jobs between the beginning product and your refrigerator. 

For processed foods like bread, add milling, mixing, baking, and equipment cleaning and maintenance. For ultraprocessed foods, add the production of every ingredient to the list. 

The food supply relies on the work of millions of people every day, at every point in the process, and every one of those workers deserves a living wage. Often, increases in labor costs are passed along to consumers. Since 2019, food supply chain labor has seen severe shortages, particularly during the first two years of the pandemic, effectively increasing food costs alongside labor costs.

Mergers, consolidations, and greed in America’s grocery stores

An increase in the price of groceries driven by mergers and acquisitions is likely to make accessing healthy, affordable foods even harder. The last thing Americans need right now is higher food prices, fewer grocery stores, and less retailer competition—exactly what the proposed mega-merger of the Kroger and Albertsons supermarket chains would have delivered to consumers. Fortunately, that merger was blocked this month in federal court through a preliminary injunction siding with the Federal Trade Commission, but a trend of smaller acquisitions and regional grocery store mergers has been persistent since 2018, contributing to higher prices through reduced competition between retailers. 

An FTC investigation of major retailers, including Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon, found that retailers used rising costs as an opportunity to price gouge consumers during COVID-19, further hiking prices and increasing their profits. Additionally, during the Kroger-Albertsons merger trial, a Kroger executive testified that Kroger hiked prices of milk and eggs “significantly higher” than necessary to account for inflation. Concerns of exploitative pricing have also emerged in Massachusetts after a study found that Stop & Shop charged higher prices in a neighborhood with lower income compared to a nearby wealthier, suburban counterpart. Worse, grocery chains that increased prices when there were food shortages and supply issues during the pandemic simply never reduced prices, meaning the easing of those pandemic-related cost increases never reached the consumer. Families have simply continued paying more for less; meanwhile, retailer profit margins have increased, and the CEOs of the country's largest grocery retailers took home as much as $26 million in 2023.

A perfect storm for food insecurity

Already historically high food prices are keeping Americans from accessing enough food and healthy food. Compound all these factors with a 19.2 percent increase in the price of all goods since 2019, an overall increase in housing costs that reached 47 percent in some areas, and a real median income that increased only 17.3 percent over the same period, and American families are struggling. 

The impact is disproportionate, of course; households in the lowest income quintile spent 33 percent of their income on food, while households in the highest income quintile spent about 8 percent of their income on food. American households that were food insecure—who didn’t have enough to eat, and didn’t know where their next meals would come from—increased from 10.5 percent in 2019 to 13.5 percent in 2024; that’s about 4.8 million more households, or around 10.2 million American adults and children without enough to eat.

How CSPI is fighting food insecurity

CSPI’s work on the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, the National School Breakfast and Lunch Programs, SNAP, WIC, and Summer EBT help keep America’s children fed—especially when food costs soar. With the 2024 Farm Bill still in limbo, you can help by telling Congress to support child nutrition programs in the next federal budget and by urging your state’s representatives to support access to healthy foods. 

In 2023, as many as 76 American counties didn’t have a full-service grocery store—increasing food insecurity and driving up grocery and transportation costs for people who have to travel to another county to shop for food. That’s why we told Dollar General, which has 35,000 stores in the United States, to feed families better and expand their food options to include healthy items. Today, Dollar General offers fresh produce at more than 5,000 stores.

Because we don’t accept any advertising and we take no money from industry or government agencies, CSPI relies on readers like you to support our work. Make a donation today, and consider giving monthly.