What if your grocery bill never stopped growing?

Not just one bad year. Not just COVID-related disruption. Not just a temporary blip during supply chain chaos. What if it went up in 2020, then up again in 2021, then up in 2022, and 2023, and 2024, without a single year of reprieve?

That's the reality for households in the Rest of North Island. Their annual food costs hit $15,443 in 2024. Four years earlier, they were paying $12,615. That's $2,828 more every year, just to buy the same groceries (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional).

Break that down to weekly terms: an extra $54 at the checkout. Every single week. For four straight years.

The trajectory tells the story. In 2020, as New Zealand entered lockdown, food costs sat at $12,615. By 2021, they'd climbed to $12,926. Then $13,992 in 2022. Then a sharp jump to $15,362 in 2023. This year brought barely any relief: just $81 less than last year, landing at $15,443.

That $81 drop? It's the grocery equivalent of finding loose change in your couch. After years of relentless increases, it changes nothing about the larger picture: food is now 22% more expensive than it was before the pandemic hit.

For a household earning the median wage, that $2,828 increase represents about three weeks of take-home pay. For families already stretched thin, it's the difference between managing and falling behind. It's the KiwiSaver contributions that stop. The dentist appointments that get postponed. The school trip that becomes unaffordable.

And here's what makes it exhausting: there's no peak in sight. The data runs back 25 years, and while costs have always trended upward, the steepness of the recent climb is unprecedented. The four-year increase from 2020 to 2024 is larger than the entire increase from 2010 to 2018.

This isn't about individual shopping choices or switching to home brands. This is structural. When food costs rise this fast and this consistently, it reshapes household budgets completely. Everything else gets squeezed.

The Rest of North Island covers everywhere from Taupo to Whanganui to Gisborne. These aren't Auckland prices. These are the costs facing households in smaller centres, provincial towns, rural communities. Places where wages are typically lower and options are fewer.

The question households are asking isn't whether food will get cheaper. It's whether their incomes can ever catch up. Right now, the answer is no.