A household in rural Canterbury is now spending $296 a week on groceries. Four years ago, that same household was spending $240. That's not inflation creep. That's a structural shift in what it costs to feed a family outside the main centres.

The latest data for the rest of the South Island shows annual food costs hit $15,380 in 2024, up from $12,464 in 2020. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional) That's a 23% jump in four years, or roughly $2,900 more per household. Break it down weekly and you're looking at an extra $56 landing on every grocery receipt.

What makes this particularly sharp is the acceleration. From 2020 to 2021, food costs rose $311 for the year. From 2023 to 2024, they rose $248. The pace has barely slowed, even as headline inflation cooled. The grocery bill just keeps climbing.

This matters differently in smaller towns. In Timaru, Ashburton, Oamaru, the places this data covers, wages tend to run lower than the cities. A $56 weekly increase hits harder when your household income is $10,000 or $15,000 below the Auckland median. You can't switch to a cheaper supermarket when there's only one. You can't hunt for deals across three different stores when the nearest alternative is 40 minutes away.

The trajectory tells you everything. In 2022, annual food costs sat at $13,795. By 2023, they'd jumped to $15,132. That's $1,337 in a single year, the steepest climb in the dataset. This year's increase of $248 looks modest only by comparison. It's still a power bill. It's still two weeks of petrol. It's still money that used to go somewhere else.

And this is the rest of the South Island, where people grow vegetables, raise chickens, have space for a chest freezer. Imagine what this looks like in a Wellington flat or an Auckland apartment, where those buffers don't exist.

The 50-year dataset shows something else: we've never seen food costs rise this fast for this long. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional) Previous spikes were sharp but brief. This one started in 2020 and hasn't let up. Every year adds another layer. Every year makes last year's shock feel normal.

For households in rural Canterbury, Southland, the West Coast, this isn't a news story. It's what happened to their budget between 2020 and now. It's why the savings account stopped growing. It's why KiwiSaver contributions dropped to 3%. It's why the car repair got deferred and the holiday didn't happen.

$15,380 a year. $1,282 a month. $296 a week. That's what it costs to eat in the rest of the South Island now. Four years ago, it cost $240 a week. The gap between those two numbers is the story of household finances in 2025.