Eve is here. Wolf Richter has two useful articles on the latest inflation data. His companion article, “Massive Outliers in Rent Equivalents That Depressed Owner CPI, Core CPI, and Core Services CPI: Something Wrong with the BLS,” examines where the numerical corrections were that had the effect of lowering the key reported inflation measures. This article explores the continuing pain of rising food prices.
Written by Wolf Richter, editor of Wolf Street. Originally published as Wolf Street
According to data officially released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPI inflation index for “household food” increased in September by 0.32% from August (4.0% annualized rate) and by 2.7% year over year, the worst increase since August 2023. Since January 2020, the CPI for food at home has increased by 30%.
CPI “Food at home” tracks different categories of food and beverages that consumers purchase in stores and markets and consume off-premises, such as at home. However, prices do not rise in unison. Egg prices plummeted again in the months following the soaring bird flu outbreak, and continued to fall into September. But beef prices have soared. Coffee prices have gone from skyrocketing to falling. And dairy products have hit a plateau at a very high level. Hundreds of food and beverage items make up the total household food CPI.
This graph shows the price level of CPI food in households. There was a sharp rise in 2021-2022, a slight decline in early 2023, followed by a sustained but gradual rise in prices, which began to accelerate again in mid-2024. Currently, household food prices have increased by 30% since the beginning of 2020.
Beef prices have been rising for five years as the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to a 64-year low for a variety of reasons and supplies are tight. Prices continue to rise due to American demand for beef despite high prices. Americans get the flu, moan, and groan about the high price of beef, but they won’t give up on beef easily.
Overall beef prices rose 1.2% in September from August and 14.7% compared to the same month last year. But there are signs that the multi-year emergence is starting to slow.
For example, the average price of ground beef, which has exploded 63% since the start of 2020, rose only 0.1% in September from August, due to a rounding error, at $6.32 per pound.
After several years of sharp increases in two stages, the CPI for roasted coffee (including roasted whole beans, ground coffee, and instant coffee) fell by 0.1% in September from August, roughly following global commodity prices for green coffee beans, albeit with a slight lag.
+22% from July 2021 to February 2023, +21% from August 2024 to August 2025.
Since January 2020, coffee CPI has skyrocketed by 46%.
Green coffee beans are a global commodity, traded on a variety of platforms, and prices are highly volatile, often driven by drought, poor harvests, market forces, and now tariff concerns.
For example, Arabica coffee futures prices (chart below from Trading Economics):
+150% from mid-2020 to early 2022 and then they gave up some of that surge. +125% from late 2023 to late 2024. As the prospective market reacted strongly to the tariff announcements, it spiked, crashed, and spiked again in 2025, and is now just below its level in early February.
These are wild price fluctuations that are not reflected in the retail price of roasted coffee. Since the beginning of 2020, coffee futures prices have soared 300%, and the CPI for roasted coffee sold by retailers has increased 46% over the same period.
Egg prices have fallen after soaring, but are still high. Bird flu has split into two waves, the first in 2022 and the second in 2024, each causing egg shortages, empty shelves, limited purchasing where eggs are available, and significant price increases.
The average price of large Grade A eggs rose 368% from $1.33 per dozen in mid-2020 to $6.23 per dozen in March 2025, the peak of the second wave. Since then, prices have plummeted.
Prices continued to decline in September to $3.49 per dozen Grade A large eggs, according to the BLS today. It was -2.8% for the month. It’s now down 44% from its March peak, but still 146% higher than they expected in 2020.
Dairy products and related products were even more shocking during the period of high inflation from 2020 to 2022, surging by 22%, and prices have remained at such high levels ever since.
According to today’s BLS, the CPI for dairy products and related products fell 0.5% in September from August. This was an increase of 0.7% compared to the same period last year.
Main categories of CPI Food at home
Beef, coffee, eggs, and dairy products are among the most volatile food categories. However, there were other categories where prices increased, all for their own reasons. For example, in 2022 and 2023, the price of infant formula skyrocketed amid shortages, suddenly putting a lot of pressure on families with young children, even though other consumers didn’t notice.
The table below under the category “Coffee, Tea, etc.” also includes tea and “Other Beverage Ingredients.” The coffee CPI shown in the chart above is for coffee (ground, whole bean, and instant) only.
The “Beef and Veal” category in the table is much broader than the ground beef example in the image above.
The category “Eggs” includes all types of eggs, not just the Grade A eggs shown in the table above.
Month over month Home foods 0.3% 2.7% Cereals, breads and bakery products 0.7% 1.6% Beef and vegetables 1.2% 14.7% Pork 0.5% 1.6% Poultry 0.1% 1.4% Seafood -0.3% 2.1% Eggs -4.7% -1.3% Dairy products and related products -0.5% 0.7% Fresh produce -0.5% -0.2% Fresh vegetables 0.0% 2.8% Juices and non-alcoholic drinks 1.4% 3.1% Coffee, tea, etc. -0.1% 18.9% Oils and fats 0.3% -1.7% Baby food and powdered milk 1.3% 0.6% Alcoholic drinks at home 0.0% 0.3%
The soaring and soaring food prices, and after the soaring, the food prices that remain high are causing a lot of hardship for less affluent consumers, who suddenly have to make all kinds of compromises to put food on the table. Food prices are not negligible.
