While reviewing 2024 household expenditures at year’s end, the items within each grocery bill were retrievable.  Access to this level of analysis opens new opportunities for understanding food prices.

In the random data universe, this is an n=1.  In other words, looking at a single household’s food purchases is analyzing a serially correlated, non-random sample of one.  Not very statistically sound.

But the embedded knowledge from making the purchases, where they were purchase, and why; makes it ideal for illustration purposes.

• Local food – Food is purchased locally every chance we can.  But when savings from purchases in a neighboring community justify a 20-mile drive, we do that also.
• Brand vs. generic label – Sometimes we buy brand name products.  Other times we purchase store-label, generic products.
• Seasonality vs. Retailer strategy – Some products have seasonal prices and some grocers routinely mark down certain types of products.

Food prices in most cases represent an average price.  They are randomized due mostly to large datasets.  But much of the finesse is lost in the aggregation.

This dataset is in its least-developed form.  As this data gets cleaned and expanded, it will get better.  In tabulating historical data, plans have been made to collect better data that is nearly automatically entered without error.  But we have enough to dive in!

The prices are converted to $/ounce.  Some simplifying assumptions were made, like 16 oz equals 1 pound, regardless of product density or moisture levels.  A $4/gallon of milk may have different qualities across brands and milk fat content, but here a gallon of milk is a gallon of milk.  Prices here go from January 2024 through December 2024.

In this chart, milk purchases had the lowest prices, at less than $0.05 (5 cents) per ounce.  Ice cream is only purchased when prices go below certain prices.   For the year, ice cream prices hovered right around $0.05 per ounce price.

Egg prices began in January last year below ice cream prices and moved higher throughout the year.  The higher egg prices in December 2024 were right at $4/dozen.

Store-brand, cottage cheese prices were stable all year at $0.10 to $0.12/ounce.

The high price product winner was cheese.  This is mostly generic, pre-slice cheese.  Deli-style sliced, on demand, cheese is much higher, but those prices have not made the dataset.

Take homes:

1. Milk is a great value!
2. Most all grocery prices in these product categories are flat, and not increasing.
3. Eggs are the only series that increased in prices in 2024.
4. Cheese costs more than five times more than ice cream.  If eggs sold for $8/dozen they would still be less costly than generic pre-sliced cheese (in this dataset).

This data will provide food price fun for some time to come.  One thing that prompted this exercise is that some product prices that are purchased every month have not increased over the course of 2024.   Some product prices have.  Discussions at the national level about food prices lose all the nuances of different product prices.  Stay tuned!