Here's a thought experiment: imagine your grocery spending had been locked at 2020 levels. Every week, you'd walk out of the supermarket spending the same amount you did before COVID hit.

For a South Island household, that would mean saving $2,796 this year alone. Not a hypothetical number. That's the actual difference between what the average South Island family spent on food in 2020 versus 2024. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

Put another way: you're now spending $53.77 more every single week on the same groceries. That's two tanks of petrol. A power bill. Half a week's rent for some.

The numbers tell a relentless story. In 2020, South Island food costs sat at 12,509 on the index. Then came the supply chain chaos, the fertiliser price spike, the fuel costs, the labour shortages. By 2024, that figure hit 15,305. A 22.4% jump in four years.

Compare that to the previous four-year period. Between 2016 and 2020, food prices barely moved. The index crept from 11,872 to 12,509. A 5.4% increase. Manageable. Expected. The kind of inflation you could absorb without rearranging your entire budget.

But 2020 to 2024? That's different. That's the kind of increase that forces choices. Cheaper cuts of meat. Store brands instead of the usual. Skipping the fresh berries. Stretching the mince across an extra meal.

The trajectory is what makes this alarming. The index jumped 1,227 points between 2020 and 2022. Then another 1,329 points in 2022 and 2023. Last year, the increase slowed to 241 points, but it's still climbing. There's no plateau in sight.

Zoom out to the full dataset, and you see just how abnormal this moment is. The food price index has been tracked since 1975. For most of that half-century, increases were gradual, predictable. The kind of thing you'd notice in hindsight, not week to week at the checkout.

But these past four years have compressed what used to take a decade into a single government term. The grocery bill that quietly grew over time now screams for attention every time you scan your card.

That $2,796 difference isn't coming back. This is the new baseline. Which means every household budget written in 2025 starts from a number that would have seemed impossible in 2020. And every conversation about cost-of-living pressures, wage growth, and household debt needs to account for this: food got 22% more expensive in four years, and nobody's weekly shop is going back to what it was.