The cost of the average basket of groceries monitored by interest.co.nz is at an all time high, hitting $183.67 this week.
It ended December 2021 at $172.59, the month Statistics NZ reported a 4.5% annual increase in food prices, the highest in a decade.
The continued upward momentum this month shows even steeper rises are already underway this year and bumpy road is ahead for our supermarket trolleys.
Our sample list is priced up weekly in Countdown New Zealand, as well as Woolworths Australia, for the purposes of comparison over time and can be tracked here.
Inflation figures out this week also had our whip round the grocery store securely in its sights, hitting a three-decade high with consumer prices rising 5.9%.
Vegetable prices rose 14% and milk, cheese, and eggs were up 7%.
The price of tomatoes has been a hot topic recently, it nearly doubled in the year to December 2021.
“The weighted average price of 1kg of tomatoes increased from $3.33 in December 2020 to $6.61 in December 2021,” said Katrina Dewbery, consumer prices manager at Statistics NZ.
Grocery price monitor
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17 Comments
NZ and Australia shoppers do not really understand what's coming. The FMCG / grocery sectors are already among the most expensive in the world for shoppers. Lack or market scale and lack of opportunities for supply chain / production efficiencies are huge barriers for shelf prices.
Furthermore, in terms of product lines and categories, NZ and Australia are carrying far too much. A kind of hyper-consumerism with many 'nice to have' products. But there are too many 'nice to haves' and not enough high-quality, affordable store brands (low incentive to manufacture) compared to the UK, Japan, U.S., and Europe.
NZ's food prices had been relatively stable throughout the years. If we really want to complain about high food prices we should start on the year when farming subsidies were removed from farmers while the rest of the world carried on subsidising their country's food for the betterment of its citizens.
Compared to the rest of the world, we have no dramatic price spikes in food prices.
How about addressing the article, and the issue, folks?
Energy is becoming more contested.
Energy underwrites everything, particuarly food (which is energy to start with, plus processing plus delivery).
The 'cost' will therefore rise; effectively closing the poor out from food. And the process will continue.
Unless the energy-underwritten overall system collapses, of course.....
But put that under a journo's nose, and there is?
silence........
Unfortunately true that everything we have in society that we depend on to live is heavily dependent on energy and even more so the transport/logistics of goods and services. Without petrol we would have no food supply for our city, no homes for the masses, no internet and technology for businesses, and no sewage or electrical systems. The trouble is that with increasing prices the poorest are the hardest hit and yet NZ has chosen to subsidize the most wealthy in the nation over ensuring the resilience of the low income people. Leading to massive food, housing, work, medical and education shortages. Which in turn reduces the ability of society to support those wealthy enough to circumvent some petrol based services or too rich to not care about increasing cents on a dollar. When it comes time for their medical services to be withdrawn due to a lack of nursing staff surely we can only hope they may think about how those staff can afford to live in the same city as their patients but until then we have to put up with the ignorant wealthy leeches of societies wealth who take and ignore those scratching in the dirt for food below them.
milk, cheese... were up 7%.
This Govt spending and reckless RBNZ driven inflation is getting ridiculous.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/460149/fonterra-milk-price-payout-5…]
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