Picture a family in Ashburton or Timaru, loading their weekly shop into the boot. Same supermarket. Same basic items: milk, bread, meat, vegetables. But that trolley now costs them nearly $300 a week. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

That's the reality across what Stats NZ calls the 'Rest of South Island': everywhere outside Christchurch and Dunedin. In 2024, the average household there spent $15,380 on food. Four years ago, in 2020, it was $12,464. That's an extra $2,916 a year disappearing into groceries alone.

The trajectory tells a story politicians would rather you didn't notice. In 2021, the figure climbed to $12,775. By 2022, it jumped to $13,795. Then 2023: $15,132. And now, in 2024, it's hit $15,380. This isn't a spike. It's a relentless climb, year after year, with no sign of reversing.

Here's what makes this quietly devastating: these aren't households in high-income urban centres where wages might have kept pace. These are communities where the median income sits well below Auckland or Wellington levels, where a single supermarket often dominates a town, where driving an extra 30 minutes to save $10 on groceries costs you half of that in petrol.

The $2,916 increase since 2020 works out to $56 more per week, every week, for four years straight. That's a power bill. That's school uniforms and sports fees. That's the difference between getting through the fortnight and hitting the overdraft three days early.

And while headline inflation figures have cooled, this data shows something different: food prices have locked in their gains. The climb from $15,132 in 2023 to $15,380 in 2024 is modest compared to previous years, sure. But it's still an increase. Prices aren't coming down. They're just rising more slowly.

The data goes back to 1999, covering 50 years of regional food pricing. What it shows is this: the post-2020 surge wasn't an aberration. It was a permanent reset. Households adjusted their budgets, cut back elsewhere, and learned to live with grocery bills that would have seemed unthinkable five years ago.

For a region where industries like farming, forestry, and small-scale manufacturing dominate employment, where many workers haven't seen wage growth that matches these increases, the numbers are stark. You can't work around food. You can't opt out of eating. And when your grocery bill climbs 23% in four years while your pay packet grows by single digits, something has to give.

This is the quiet erosion happening in towns most politicians fly over on their way between cities. No protests. No headlines. Just families spending an extra $56 every single week, and wondering when it stops.