Why Did North Island Grocery Bills Only Rise $156 This Year?
While RNZ reports households freezing spending due to soaring bills, food price data shows the slowest annual grocery increase in five years. The question isn't why bills are rising. It's why they suddenly stopped accelerating.
Key Figures
While RNZ reports households putting spending on ice as soaring bills bite, there's a number buried in the grocery data that doesn't fit the narrative: North Island food bills rose just $156 this year.
That's the smallest annual increase since 2020. For context, between 2022 and 2023, the same households saw their grocery bills jump $1,322. The year before that, $1,054. This year? A tenth of that (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional).
So why does it still feel like your grocery shop is destroying your budget? Because it is. North Island households are now spending $15,462 a year on groceries. That's 23% higher than four years ago. The pain isn't new. It's cumulative.
Here's what happened: between 2020 and 2023, food prices went berserk. COVID supply chains broke. Fuel costs spiked. Fertiliser prices doubled. Supermarkets raised prices month after month, and by late 2023, the average North Island household was paying $1,100 more per year than they had in 2020.
Then, suddenly, the acceleration stopped. The 2024 increase was smaller than any annual jump in the previous four years. Not because prices fell (they didn't), but because they finally stopped climbing at crisis speed.
But households never recovered from the surge. Wages didn't keep pace. Mortgage rates doubled. Power bills, insurance, rates, all climbed. So even though grocery inflation slowed, families are still spending a bigger chunk of their income on food than they were five years ago.
This is the gap between the economic data and lived experience. Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices dropped. It means they're rising more slowly. If your grocery bill jumped from $250 a week to $297 over four years, the fact it only went up $3 this year doesn't make the $297 affordable.
And that's exactly what the RNZ story captures: households aren't spending because they're still digesting four years of price shocks. The data shows grocery inflation cooling. But cooling isn't the same as reversing. A North Island family is still paying $3,872 more per year than they were in 2020.
The question now is whether wages can catch up, or whether this becomes the new baseline. Because if $15,462 a year on groceries is the floor, not the ceiling, then the spending freeze RNZ describes isn't temporary. It's structural.
This story was generated by AI from publicly available government data. Verify figures from the original source before citing.