Still astronomically high - but showing some signs of moderating. That's the situation with food price increases.
According to the latest Stats NZ Food Price Index release for January 2023, our annual rate of food price inflation was 10.3% last month, down from the 32-year high of 11.3% seen as of December 2022.
The monthly rise for January was a chunky 1.7% - but there is generally a significant seasonal rise in food prices in January months. The 1.7% latest rise was below average economists' expectations of 2.0% and compares with a whopper 2.7% increase in January last year.
Significantly, the seasonally adjusted increase in January 2023 was just 0.3%, which compares with seasonally-adjusted rises of 1.0% in November 2022 and 1.1% in December.
ASB senior economist Mark Smith said the 0.3% seasonally adjusted climb in January was the lowest monthly increase since April last year, "halting the strong run evident since the second half of last year".
However, he said about 76% of food items (77% of expenditure weight) rose in January.
"Widespread rises for food prices provide little cover for consumers, who will likely be relooking to trim any fat from the food bill," he said.
"It is our hope that annual food price inflation has peaked given lower global food commodity prices. However, the risk is that rises in food prices takes longer to slow. Recent North Island storms are expected to push food prices higher still in the coming months."
Stats NZ said that in January 2023, the annual increase in prices was due to rises "across all the broad food categories we measure". Compared with January 2022:
- grocery food prices increased by 11%
- restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food increased by 8.3%
- fruit and vegetable prices increased by 16%
- meat, poultry, and fish prices increased by 9.2%
- non-alcoholic beverage prices increased by 7.1%.
"Increasing prices for cheddar cheese, barn or cage-raised eggs, and potato chips were the largest drivers within grocery food," Stats NZ's consumer prices manager James Mitchell said.
The second-largest contributor to the annual movement was restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food.
Stats NZ said in terms of the January monthly increase in food prices grocery food was the largest contributor. Within this group, the items having the greatest impact were boxed chocolates, potato chips, and barn or cage-raised eggs.
In January 2023 compared with December 2022:
- fruit and vegetable prices rose 3.1% (down 0.8% after seasonal adjustment)
- meat, poultry, and fish prices rose 1.9%
- grocery food prices rose 1.8% (up 0.9% after seasonal adjustment)
- non-alcoholic beverage prices rose 2.1%
- restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food prices rose 0.7%.
The Food Price Index contributes 18.7% of the composition of New Zealand's widely accepted measure of overall inflation, the Consumers Price Index (CPI), which makes it the third biggest part of the CPI behind housing and household utilities and transport.
However, such has been the rise in cost of food during the past year that food prices have been having an outsized contribution - accounting for over a quarter of the 7.2% annual CPI inflation figure to December 2022 and second in size of contribution behind only housing related costs.
35 Comments
Exactly. If something went up in price from $100 to $110 in Dec, that's a 10% increase. If the same product then went up by the same quantity ($10) to $120 that's only a 9% increase.
Same quantity escalation, reducing rate of change.
It's important to understand the numbers fully!
You can keep about 6 chickens + a solid vege garden + small fruit trees (lemons + feijoas + blueberries etc) on ~500m^2 and lower your cost immensely.
It is blackberry season, tons of public land is ravaged by wild blackberry which is ripe for jams and eating.
It seems to be a cost of decadence crisis more than a cost of living crisis. Lower your expectations, put the work in (it doesn't take much work to keep a vege garden) and buy a few books on gardening, you will lower your costs immensely.
Should be able to fit this between dropping the kids off at before school care at 7:30am, working until 5pm, picking the kids up at 5:30 then cooking dinner and doing bedtime (with manic children because they have been away from their primary caregivers for all of the day). Which both adults are doing to afford rent/mortgage payments. But don't worry we have the weekend - oh wait we have to maintain our 1/4 acre sections which nobody wants.
Your comment smacks of privilege and does nothing to help our young working families
I have young kids right now, both my partner and I work full time; We are also both under 30. Gardening is by far the most relaxing and rewarding thing to do on a weekend after parenting. It doesn't take that long each weekend.
Busy people make time to achieve these things work. You end up paying more for time saved by purchasing food at supermarkets at ridiculous prices. The other option is weekend markets, they often sell fruit and veges for half the price of supermarkets.
So all I need is the 500sqm spare and for the covenants that specifically preclude me from owning anything or a cat and a dog to be lifted and I'll no longer be considered decadent?
We don't seem to have a shortage of people prepared to make assumptions about what other people can and can't do. It's a shame I can't monetize that like Newstalk ZB has.
Cool, I guess I'm disabled in that I can't use the power of my mind to make my section bigger, find the energy to just annex my neighbour's land ala German Foreign Policy 1935 - 1945 or single-handedly overturn the legal covenant that restricts me from owning poultry or livestock?
I'd love to be lucky enough that it was a question of hard work or whatever talking point about lazy young people goes in here, but that's not the world some of us live in.
You've disabled yourself to a certain extent, for sure.
If your entire situation is intolerable, then your options are to make a radical change to your situation (i.e. do something different, somewhere else), make a large amount of small changes, or keep suffering.
That's not to say any of that is easy, but it's not supposed to be.
As if you haven't noticed, there is a massive generational gap here. Most young families I know have virtually zero time and close to zero financial flexibility. They have had to borrow massive amounts (requiring both parents to work long hours) to buy postage stamp size land and over expensive buildings, just to put a roof over their childrens heads. Over the past decade, they haven't had a choice, if they want a family, to do this. The occasional family has inherited wealth or had parents help and have been able to afford a quarter acre section or something considerably bigger, but they are the exception. Most are now faced with decreasing value of their assets and possible negative equity, combined with hugely increased mortgage payments.
This is why everyone is calling out your privilege for suggesting "they did this to themselves". The only thing they did to themselves was be born at a time when a generally greedy older generation screwed them to maintain a lifestyle created by a fossil fuel boom, which is now rapidly drawing to a close, which you can see today if you look out the window. So they have all of these problems AND they have to clean up the mess caused by the previous generations who were profligate in their resource expenditure, happy to steal the resources of their grandchildren and use them themselves.
Furthermore, it's simply silly to suggest that *everyone* can just choose to do X. Ignoring that there simply may not be enough of X to go around, or that our economic system artificially puts up the price of X so even if there technically is enough of X to go around, there isn't sufficient money to pay for it.
In this case X is "buy enough land with good sun and rain to make gardening worth while".
As if you haven't noticed, there is a massive generational gap here.
I'm probably less than 10 years older. When my kids were toddlers my partner and I worked over 120hrs a week between us to barely stand still. I didn't own any house. People were making the same noises then. It took about 2 years to work out what I was doing was the equivalent of putting a square peg in a round hole.
You are correct, things are expensive, time is in short supply, and it's not getting any easier. But it's still possible to have a decent life in NZ, just not doing what most people do, consuming too much and producing too little.
Apparently it's up to your employer to increase your productivity, and someone else to provide you items a low cost. That may be a long wait.
Protip most the poor people have significant severe disabilities Thanks stats nz for info. Society deems disabled people must be poor and begging for survival. It makes those middle income feel better about their position which is really good for the most wealthy.
Been there done that before heart condition and it costs 10x as much to ensure a viable harvest, 20x for urban livestock care. Cheaper food from fruit and vege shop, heck even supermarket is way cheaper. Have you seen the price of medical care for livestock. If land, soil and water was free it would only affect the cost a little. Hence even community gardens are uneconomic, less reliable and more inefficient than market gardens.
Anyone noticed Countdowns are absolutely having a laugh with some of their prices of fresh fruit/veggies at the moment? Thorndon NW, which is supposed to be one of the most expensive, is significantly cheaper than our local Countdown in the produce section.
Best thing is to go to farmers markets though, we pay pretty much half price for all fruit and veggies compared to supermarkets, specials are often 1/3 the price. The "Supermarket Inquiry" debacle instead bolstered the supermarkets into jacking up prices, since they saw nothing would be done to them.
I have a list of about 25 recipes that I can feed my family of 3 for < $10 on and they really like.
Last night's dinner I had 4 uncooked sausages and 1/4 of a week old cabbage to use up so cut up 2 carrots and an onion and made a sausage casserole type thing with half a tin of beans. There was enough for lunch for the next day. Took 15 minutes to make. It's tough out there yes, at the same time walk around a supermarket and have a look at the pre-packaged expensive and unhealthy crap that piles up in our supermarket trolleys.
People are just lazy it's a simple as that. Claiming healthy food is expensive etc....uhhhh okay??? Prices from Pak N Save website etc:
- Cheapest Potato Chips $1.70 per 150g ($11.30 per kg). Muesli Bars $12.50 per kg. Big Mac $8 (250gm = $32 kg), Cheeseburger 100gms $4 = $40 kg, Scoop of chips roughly 350gms = $3 ($11.67 per kg).
- Apples - $5kg, Potatoes $5kg, Oranges $6kg, Frozen Broccoli $3.70 per 750gm, Basic uncooked pasta $3kg, Mince $16kg. Pams mixed vegies 1kg, 2 for $5 ($2.50kg). A pack of Hellers sausages is $10.50 per kg, cooked with mashed potato and devilled sausages mix.
All inedible and unable to be cooked for a significant percentage of the population. But you're alright Jack being lucky ableist and rich to afford those choices. Try affording a days worth of safe (which means significantly different foods) cooked food for $2 but don't skint to get malnutrition. Compare the price of a single gluten free loaf of bread to a $1 loaf. Compare the difference in having a kitchen you own to a hotel room with no cooking surfaces to speak of. Compare the plants that are known to be safe for digestion to those which you have mentioned which are known to be harmful to many people. Compare the fact that you cannot get a whole days worth of meat for $1, nor enough for a week or a month even when frozen at a rate of a single spoon size a day. Protip real poverty does not have your budget and donated meat and vegetable items are much rarer at food banks. Also protip different human bodies exist we do not all get to have your internal organs and bleeding from our own is not a great experience especially when they need to be cut out after consuming what you eat.
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