Something has quietly shifted in the way Americans experience the supermarket. The cart looks roughly the same, the store layout is familiar, and yet the total at checkout feels like a gut punch every single time. What used to cost $100 now demands closer to $200, not because of one explosive price spike, but because of years of relentless, compounding increases that have permanently reset what groceries cost. Understanding why requires looking at the numbers, the culprits, and the coping strategies that millions of shoppers have already adopted.
The Cumulative Hit: How Grocery Prices Piled Up Since 2020
U.S. food-at-home prices increased 24.0 percent between January 2020 and January 2023 alone. That staggering run didn’t happen gradually or evenly – it came in waves. Overall inflation in the United States peaked in 2022, as did food prices, which surged 9.9 percent from the previous year. Since then, U.S. food price increases have tapered off, growing 5.8 percent in 2023 and 2.3 percent in 2024. So yes, the rate of increase has slowed – but prices themselves never came back down.
As of March 2024, food prices had risen a cumulative 25.8 percent since November 2020. To put that in perspective, a basket of groceries that cost $100 in November 2020 would now set a shopper back $125.80. While the annual rate is more modest now, grocery prices are up nearly 30 percent since the pandemic began. For households that already stretched their budgets tightly, this isn’t just arithmetic – it’s a genuine change in quality of life.
The Specific Culprits: Eggs, Beef, and Orange Juice
Prices for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs increased the most across food categories in 2024, up 4.2 percent. Within this group, egg prices rose 36.8 percent, following a decline of 23.8 percent in 2023. Eggs became a symbol of grocery inflation precisely because their price swings were so dramatic and visible. Egg prices have spiked intermittently since 2022 due to the bird flu. While prices are now down about 13 percent year over year, the average price of a dozen eggs reached $6.20 in early 2025. In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a carton of eggs cost just $1.50.
Beef is a different story – one with less relief in sight. Since January 2025, the average price per pound of beef jumped 9 percent to $9.26, and over the past year steak prices are up 12.4 percent. While herd sizes can grow, it takes longer for a cow to mature, and the rising price of feed isn’t expected to decline anytime soon, meaning it costs a fair bit more to raise cattle. Beyond beef and eggs, average orange juice prices are up 28 percent and ground beef prices are up 15 percent from January 2025.
Shrinkflation: Paying the Same, Getting Less
Shrinkflation, also known as product downsizing, occurs when manufacturers decrease the quantity of an item without a corresponding price drop. Sometimes the price doesn’t change at all. Other times it goes down slightly, but the per-unit price is still higher than before. This is inflation that shoppers don’t always catch at the register. Roughly three quarters of Americans have noticed shrinkflation at their grocery store, and among them, 81 percent have taken some kind of action as a result. Nearly half of American shoppers have abandoned a brand due to shrinkflation.
Currently, 56 percent of Americans say they’ve noticed grocery packaging getting smaller without price drops several times – a five-point decline from last year. At the same time, the share who say they haven’t noticed any grocery shrinkflation has increased by five points. Still, it remains a familiar experience for most: 81 percent of grocery shoppers say they’ve noticed shrinkflation recently. On average, the per-unit price increase among downsized products ranged from 12 percent for paper towels to 32 percent for coffee. That’s a hidden tax on every shopping trip, rarely announced and rarely reversed.
How Shoppers Are Fighting Back
Data from retail analytics firm 84.51° shows that 69 percent of consumers in November 2024 reported looking for sales, deals, and coupons more often, up from 64 percent in January. Likewise, 54 percent reported cutting back on non-essentials in November compared to 52 percent in January, and 49 percent switched to a less expensive brand compared to 47 percent in January. These aren’t dramatic behavioral changes on their own, but collectively they represent a fundamental shift in how Americans approach the weekly shop.
Consumers’ shifting definition of value has caused a decline in mainstream consumer packaged goods brands and growth in private label (+3 percent), premium (+2 percent), and super premium brands (+4 percent) compared to a year ago. It sounds counterintuitive that premium brands would grow during a period of financial stress, but many consumers are trading down in volume while trading up in quality on the items they do buy. In the year following 2022’s large price increases, consumers reduced their share of food-at-home spending on most animal-based protein products except for eggs. Per gram, these products typically are among the more expensive foods, so consumers chose less expensive substitutes. In contrast, consumers increased spending on cereals and bakery products and on the “other foods” category, which includes processed and prepared meals.
Grocery Store Profits and the Corporate Pricing Question
Despite the headwinds facing consumers, grocery stores’ profit margins actually increased in recent years, according to a March 2024 report by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC report notes that food and beverage retailers saw their revenues outpace their costs by more than 6 percent in 2021. That was a new high for that particular profit measure until 2023, when it reached 7 percent. This is a fact that sits uncomfortably alongside shoppers’ mounting frustration at the checkout line.
In 2024, U.S. consumers, businesses, and government entities spent $2.58 trillion on food and beverages. In 2024, U.S. consumers spent an average of 10.4 percent of their disposable personal incomes on food, a decrease from 10.6 percent in 2023. This decline shows a small shift in consumer spending habits, and specifically, the budget share allocated to food-at-home spending decreased from 5.0 percent in 2023 to 4.9 percent in 2024. In 2023, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,278 on food, representing 32.6 percent of after-tax income. The burden, in other words, falls hardest on those least equipped to absorb it.
What 2026 Looks Like at the Checkout
In 2026, overall food prices are predicted to rise 3.0 percent. Food-away-from-home prices are predicted to rise 4.6 percent, faster than their 20-year historical average rate of price increase of 3.5 percent. Food-at-home prices, however, are predicted to rise 1.7 percent, slower than their 20-year historical average rate of price increase of 2.6 percent. That sounds manageable in isolation, but it layers on top of a price base that is already 25 to 30 percent higher than it was five years ago.
Beef and veal prices are predicted to increase 9.4 percent in 2026. Unstable weather conditions and tariffs have pushed up the price of bananas, and fish and seafood prices are up significantly. Part of the tariff impact could reflect retailers absorbing costs for now, but it could take about a year for the downstream effects to be felt by consumers. Nearly half of Americans say groceries have become harder to afford since 2024, according to a September 2025 survey from Axios and The Harris Poll. The math at the supermarket hasn’t just changed – for millions of families, it has been completely rewritten.
