Unless you live entirely on what you grow, you no doubt got hit by 2022’s troubling inflation at the grocery store – the first time since 1979 that grocery inflation has had a double-digit annual increase.
On Thursday, the Labor Department will release the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for December but Datasembly’s 2022 Grocery Price Index Year-End Update reveals that the cost of groceries in 2022 surged a whopping 16.3%, compared to 2021 where we saw a 6.2% increase and 2020 which climbed only 1.1%.
Who and what got hit?
While there wasn’t a zip code that didn’t get hit by grocery inflation, there were some areas and product lines that got hammered.
Frozen food had the highest percentage of inflation – a 21.3% increase. And for those who decided to drink away their inflationary concerns, they didn’t have to spend too much to do that because alcohol had the lowest increase of 4.2%
The highest rates of grocery price inflation across the states in 2022 were in Connecticut and Louisiana at 19.5% – mostly in Hartford/New Haven and New Orleans; Idaho at 19.3%; Iowa at 19.2%; and Mississippi at 19.0%
The states with the lowest rate of grocery price inflation in 2022 were North Carolina, where the rate was 14.6% in Raleigh/Durham and 14.8% in Charlotte.
Maryland had a grocery inflation rate of 14.6% while it was 15.4% in Maine and 15.1% in Pennsylvania.