Here's the tension: food prices in provincial South Island are at an all-time high. Yet the annual increase from 2023 to 2024 was just 1.6%, the smallest jump in four years.

The Rest of South Island's food price index hit 15,380 in 2024, up from 15,132 the year before. That sounds modest. But zoom out and the picture changes. In 2020, before COVID reshaped everything, that same index sat at 12,464. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

The math is blunt: groceries cost $2,916 more per year than they did five years ago. That's 23% more for the same basket of food.

The trajectory tells the story. From 2020 to 2021, prices climbed 2.5%. Then 2021 to 2022: up 8%. The following year: another 9.7%. Those were the years that broke household budgets. The 1.6% rise in 2024 feels gentle by comparison, but only because we've normalised the new baseline.

This isn't Auckland or Wellington, where high costs are baked into the housing market and wage structures. This is the provinces: Marlborough, Nelson, Tasman, the West Coast. Places where lower housing costs were supposed to offset everything else. Where you moved for the lifestyle and stretched your dollar further.

That trade-off is eroding. A family spending $300 a week on groceries in 2020 now spends $369 for the same items. Over a year, that's an extra $3,588. For renters, that's a month's rent. For first-home buyers, that's the deposit creeping further away.

The smaller 2024 increase suggests inflation is cooling. But cooling doesn't mean reversing. Prices aren't coming back down. The new floor is 23% higher than it was when COVID started, and every household in provincial South Island is standing on it.

The contrast is this: the pain of 2022 and 2023 has eased. But the cumulative damage remains. You're not being squeezed as hard this year. You're just holding steady at a level that was unthinkable four years ago.

That's the story inside the index. The crisis has passed. The cost hasn't.