In 2020, a household in the Rest of North Island region spent $12,615 on food for the year. That's the baseline. The year COVID arrived, lockdowns hit, and the world changed.

Then came 2021. The grocery bill crept up to $12,926. A small jump: $311 more than the year before. Manageable. The kind of increase you might not even notice week to week.

2022 is where things shifted. The bill jumped to $13,992. That's a $1,066 increase in a single year. Supply chains were still tangled. Fuel costs were climbing. Inflation was no longer something economists talked about in abstract terms; it was showing up at the checkout.

2023 hit harder. The annual food bill reached $15,362. Another $1,370 added in twelve months. At this point, families in places like Gisborne, Hawke's Bay, Taranaki, and Manawatū-Whanganui were spending nearly $3,000 more per year on food than they had just three years earlier.

Then 2024 arrived. The bill? $15,443. It barely moved. Up just $81 from the year before.

That's the story right there. Two years of sharp, painful increases. Then a plateau. Not relief, exactly. More like exhaustion. Prices didn't fall. They just stopped climbing at the same terrifying rate.

Break that $15,443 down and you get $297 per week. For a provincial household, that's rent-level money going to the supermarket. It's more than many people spend on transport. It's closing in on what some pay for power and internet combined.

The timeline matters because it shows how fast things changed, and how quickly we adjusted our expectations. In 2020, spending $15,000 a year on groceries would have seemed absurd. By 2024, it was normal. That shift happened in four years.

The Rest of North Island isn't Auckland or Wellington. These are regions where wages are lower, where $300 a week is a bigger bite out of household income. The same trajectory played out across the country, but here it lands differently.

The plateau in 2024 might feel like good news. It's not. It's just prices staying high instead of getting higher. The $2,828 increase from 2020 to 2024 isn't coming back. This is the new floor. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)