Everyone knows groceries cost more now than they did before COVID. But here's what the numbers actually show: an Auckland household spending $299 a week on food in 2024 would have paid just $243 for the same shop in 2020. That's not inflation smoothed over decades. That's $56 more every single week. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

Do the arithmetic on that. Fifty-two weeks in a year. The extra cost since 2020 is $2,912 annually for the average household. Nearly three thousand dollars that used to go somewhere else: savings, a holiday, paying down debt, the kids' sports fees. Now it vanishes into the grocery bill.

The climb hasn't been gradual, either. From 2020 to 2021, Auckland's weekly food spend jumped to $250. The next year it hit $270. By 2023 it was $295. This year it crept to $299. Each year compounds the last. Each year makes the previous year's shock feel almost quaint.

Put yourself in the shoes of an Auckland renter. Your landlord raised the rent twice since 2020. Power bills are up. Petrol fluctuates but never seems cheap. And now, every time you walk into the supermarket, you're dropping $70 more per week than you did four years ago. That's the mortgage payment on a small loan. That's a fortnightly tank of petrol. That's gone before you've paid for anything else.

The food price index tracks what it actually costs to feed a household: meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy, bread. This isn't restaurant meals or lattes. This is the basics. The stuff you can't avoid buying. And in Auckland, those basics now cost 23% more than they did when COVID arrived.

Look at the trajectory. Since 2020, there hasn't been a single year where the number went down. Not even a pause. The 2024 figure is 15,553 on the index, up from 12,647 in 2020. That's a relentless march in one direction, and it's happening while wages struggle to keep pace.

The index goes back to 1975. Fifty years of data. Food has always gotten more expensive over time; that's how inflation works. But the speed of the last four years stands out. The gap between 2020 and 2024 is steeper than almost any comparable stretch in the dataset. This isn't normal drift. This is a structural shift in what it costs to live in New Zealand's largest city.

So when someone tells you groceries feel more expensive, believe them. The data proves it. And the number that matters isn't the percentage or the index figure. It's the $70 a week that's disappeared from your budget since the world changed in 2020.