In 1999, the Rest of North Island's food price index sat at 8,843. It was a different era: the internet was dial-up, petrol was under a dollar a litre, and your weekly grocery shop looked nothing like it does today.

For the first decade, the climb was steady but unremarkable. By 2008, the index had reached 11,289. Then the Global Financial Crisis hit. Food prices wobbled, but they didn't collapse. They kept rising, just more slowly. By 2013, the index was 11,909. Five years of economic uncertainty had added just 620 points.

The next seven years told a different story. From 2013 to 2020, the index climbed from 11,909 to 12,615. That's 706 points, but spread across seven years. For rural and provincial New Zealand, the cost of feeding your family was rising, but at a pace you could almost keep up with. Almost.

Then 2020 arrived. COVID lockdowns. Supply chain chaos. Global inflation. The brakes came off.

In 2021, the index jumped to 12,926. By 2022, it was 13,992. By 2023, 15,362. And in 2024, it hit 15,443. That's 2,828 points in four years. More than the entire increase from 1999 to 2013. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

Here's what that means in real terms: if you're shopping in Whanganui, or Taranaki, or the Bay of Plenty, your grocery bill has climbed 22% since COVID began. That's not a marginal increase. That's not something you can absorb by switching to home brand butter or skipping the biscuits. That's structural.

What's striking isn't just the size of the jump. It's the speed. From 1999 to 2020, the index rose by 3,772 points over 21 years. That's an average of 180 points per year. From 2020 to 2024, it rose by 2,828 points in four years. That's an average of 707 points per year. Nearly four times faster.

And 2024's number, 15,443, tells you something else: the acceleration has stopped, but the price isn't coming back down. The index barely moved from 2023 to 2024. It's not falling. It's just stopped climbing quite so fast.

This is the new baseline. Twenty-five years of incremental increases, then four years of upheaval, and now we're here. The Rest of North Island isn't an outlier. It's the story of what happens when inflation hits communities that were already managing on tight margins. The groceries cost what they cost now. And they're not going back.