Food Price Outlook

Grocery prices will rise by a scant 0.7 percent in 2025, the smallest increase in seven years, said USDA analysts on Thursday in their first forecast of food inflation in the new year. Grocery price inflation was forecast at a below-normal 1 percent this year.

For the third month in a row, the USDA lowered its forecast of grocery price inflation this year. The monthly Food Price Outlook estimated that grocery prices would rise by an average of 6.3 percent this year, compared to 11.4 percent in 2022.

Grocery prices will rise 7.8 percent this year, three times the usual pace for food inflation albeit slower than in 2022, said USDA economists in the monthly Food Price Outlook.

The 9.9 percent food inflation rate of 2022 will be followed by a 7.1 percent rate this year, the highest rates in three decades, said USDA economists on Wednesday. Egg prices were forecast to rise 27 percent this year, on top of a 32 percent increase in 2022.

Grocery prices will rise 3.5 percent in the new year, nearly double the long-term average but a dramatic slowdown from this year’s 11.5 percent, said the Agriculture Department Thursday in its Food Price Outlook.

Bird flu outbreaks are driving up egg and poultry meat prices far faster than usual, with eggs expected to cost 20 percent more and poultry 9 percent more this year than their 2021 averages, said the Agriculture Department on Wednesday.

Beef and pork prices are going up again this year but the increases will not be as severe as last year, said the USDA on Tuesday. The monthly Food Price Outlook reported that beef and pork prices would rise by 3.5 percent for the year, and that "Upward pressures on meat prices are expected to ease in the latter half of 2022."

Prices for many categories of food have been slow to retreat from pandemic-driven peaks, said the USDA. As a result, seafood and poultry prices throughout the year will be higher than usual, bolstering the USDA forecast that grocery prices will rise by 3 percent this year.

After soaring because of coronavirus outbreaks among packing plant employees, meat prices are on the decline for the first time this year and are headed lower, said the USDA on Tuesday.

Grocery prices will rise a modest 1.5 percent in 2021, close to the long-term average and half of the larger-than-usual increase expected this year, said the USDA in its first forecast of food inflation in the new year.

Although U.S. food prices generally show small increases from year to year, the USDA says prices for "food away from home," a category that includes restaurants, carry-out food and institutional meals, rose 3.1 percent in 2019. That's the largest increase since 3.5 percent in 2009 and is part of a pattern in which the price of food away from home rises more rapidly than retail prices for groceries.

Cattle prices are stronger than expected this year but they they are likely to run below 2017 levels, with the result that retail beef prices rise modestly, at most, said the monthly Food Price Outlook. The United States is headed for the third year in a row of lower than average food inflation - 0.5 percent compared to the 20-year average of 2.1 percent annually.

Grocery prices will rise by a nearly invisible 0.5 percent this year and a modest 1.5 percent in 2019, estimated the USDA’s monthly Food Price Outlook on Thursday. If the forecast proves true, 2019 would be the fourth year in a row that supermarket prices rise at a much slower rate than the usual 2.1 percent annually.

Americans are headed for the fourth year in a row of lower-than-normal increases in food prices, according to the USDA’s Food Price Outlook. The monthly report estimated that prices will rise by just 1.5 percent this year.

Lower prices for tomatoes, potatoes, and apples — three of the four most popular fruits and vegetables sold in America — are helping to hold down food price inflation, according to a government forecast.

Two-thirds of the way through 2017, the government says grocery prices are headed for a barely perceptible increase of 0.25 percent this year, thanks to lower red meat, egg and fresh produce prices. This year's marginal increase follows the first instance of retail food price deflation in half a century, the 1.3-percent year-on-year decline in grocery prices in 2016.