Food prices rocketed 2.5% last month - the biggest monthly rise in four years.
The sizable increase drove the annual rate of food price inflation as of January up to 4.6% from 4.0% in December.
Statistics NZ says all food subgroups increased from December 2025 to January 2026.
Higher prices for the grocery food group, up 2.3%, contributed the most to the monthly increase in food prices. This was followed by fruit and vegetables, up 6.7%.
The last time there was a food price rise of this magnitude was January 2022, when prices rose 2.7% during the period in which the Consumers Price Index (CPI), the official measure of inflation, was rising sharply to its ultimate peak of 7.3% in June 2022.
The latest spike in food prices might raise some concerns about the current rate of inflation.
As of the December quarter the CPI was recording an annual rate of inflation of 3.1%, which is outside the 1% to 3% target the Reserve Bank (RBNZ) has. Food prices make up about 18.5% of the CPI, while rents account for about 11%.
The RBNZ has its first review of the Official Cash Rate for 2026 tomorrow. No change is expected, but figures such as those released on Tuesday will increase nervousness about what might happen later in the year - although the food price rises are being offset by weaker prices elsewhere, which will actually raise hope and expectation that the CPI will move back under 3% in the current quarter.
Westpac senior economist Satish Ranchhod said January's prices update probably won't alarm the RBNZ, with higher food prices but softness in rents and other prices. "However, there was a shocking rise in chocolate prices ahead of Valentine's Day."
The food prices information was released as part of the monthly Selected Price Indexes (SPI). These make up about 47% of the components of the CPI, including some of the more volatile ones.
While the news on food prices is not cheery, there were some offsetting moves elsewhere in the indexes. Rents didn't change in the month and have risen just 1.2% in the past year, while airfares - which rocketed in December, saw something of an unwinding of that in January. Petrol and diesel prices decreased by 2.4% and 3.2% from December 2025 to January 2026, respectively.
ASB economist Wesley Tanuvasa said dormant rental inflation and easing energy inflation are welcome, but the food price inflation remains elevated and the global factors holding this up look longer lasting.
"Hawks and doves can argue the implications of high food prices on a household, but it is irksome for it to be advancing as headline CPI is outside of the target band."
Westpac's Ranchhod said that overall, the latest update on consumer prices was close to Westpac economists' forecasts, "and we expect that it won’t be too much of a surprise to the RBNZ ahead of their interest rate meeting on Wednesday".
"However, under the surface, we’re seeing divergent trends in prices in some important areas.
"Notably, food price inflation remains strong, while inflation in other areas has moderated, including rents and fuel.
"Putting this altogether, we continue to expect that annual inflation will ease back from the current elevated level of 3.1% over the course of this year. However, we still expect that inflation will remain above 2% for some time, with core inflation set to remain in the upper part of the RBNZ’s comfort zone," Ranchhod said.
Back on the food prices, Stats NZ said significant monthly price moves included:
The average price for:
• chocolate boxes was $12.57 per 250 grams box, up 62.8% monthly
• chocolate block was $6.89 per 250 grams, up 16.6% monthly
• roast lamb was $24.96 per kilogram, up 36.6% monthly
• tomatoes were $5.70 per kilogram, down 8.9% monthly
• milk was $4.81 per 2 litres, down 2.2% monthly
• yoghurt was $7.45 per six pack of 150 gram pottles, down 4.7% monthly.
In terms of the annual 4.6% food price increase, Stats NZ said higher prices for the grocery food group, up 4.0%, contributed the most to the annual increase. This was followed by meat, poultry, and fish, up 8.9% annually.
The average price for:
- beef porterhouse/sirloin steak was $45.48 per kilogram, up 22.9% annually
- chocolate block was $6.89 per 250 grams, up 20.5% annually
- white bread was $2.21 per 600 grams, up 57.9% annually
- takeaway coffee was $5.16 per cup, up 6.6% annually
- soft drinks was $3.32 per 1.5 litres, down 3.5% annually
- potato crisps was $2.10 per 150 grams, down 5.0% annually
- olive oil was $17.61 per litre, down 21.7% annually.
Stats NZ's prices and deflators spokesperson Nicola Growden said coffee drinkers may have noticed their takeaway coffee becoming more expensive, with prices up $0.32 over the past year.
"The last time there was an annual increase this high (of more than 30 cents) was in the 12 months to March 2024," she said.
"The price of a takeaway coffee is now $1.12 higher than five years ago."
Here is the detailed SPI information for January as supplied by Stats NZ:
26 Comments
$5.16 for a coffee, praise Allah for my espresso machine!
I’d like to know where I can get my latte for $5.16 - cafes I frequent are $6.50 to $7.00+
Apparently Gold Card at McDonalds a coffee is $2.50; must be those boomers driving the average down.
$7 what the hell. McDonald's sells coffee now? I'm out of touch on coffee matters.
However I complained the other day about a $21glass of wine that would have seemed small to a pygmy dwarf!
🥂
Maccas have sold coffee for as long as I can remember...and that's a long time.
Can you really call it coffee though?
At $3 for a large flat white with a super gold card it's passable. It also tastes better at that price!
Maccas have sold coffee for as long as I can remember...and that's a long time.
Around 2012, you could buy a cup of joe from Maccas for JPY100 in Japan - absolute steal and superb blend and taste in my opinion. Would buy one every morning on the ground floor before heading to my office on Rokko Island in Kobe. Same small brewed hot coffee is now JPY120 including tax (this is the “S” size Premium Roast Coffee).
Flash Harry Aotearoans would turn their nose up at such peasantry.
Still the same amd has spread to every Konbini.
Last there just before Covid and noticed the Family Mart brew coffee set-up. Outrageously good.
Was there a few years ago. I started each day with an L size from the Family Mart attached to the hotel lobby. Was maybe ¥160? Around $2 NZ. Would sit in the darkened lobby sipping good coffee, listening to the waterfall and watching the early departers shuffle around.
I think there's a market for good filter coffee in NZ. I know a few places in Auckland city. One has a $3 bottomless cup.
Filter is highly underrated. In Colombia the majority make coffee using effectively a bit of pillowcase sewn around a bent piece of wire, akin to a wind sock, and simply pour the water over to filter this way. Done right, this produces spectacular coffee, however I may be biased given most coffee there is relatively fresh and locally sourced.
I find it smoother and more full bodied, but it can still have a strong taste.
Cote d'Azur is obviously a troll, sometimes using sophisticated language, other times using casual slang
The blurbs on the dating apps have started to use AI . It's next level. A friend informs me
Stats NZ have a lot more chocolate in their basket than we do...
Ironically as groceries are a necessity this actually acts like an interest rate tightening on the overall economy.
OCR on the up.
Yes, let's raise the OCR, that will teach people to stop spending money on food !
The economists ( especially bank) and commentators try and tell us the economy is really starting to hum and that inflation will fall to within the 2% band in 2026 and this year we will see economic growth of between 4-6%, with capacity constraints with the economic recovery now well underway. That's fairy dust stuff. The facts tell us; Inflation has risen steadily since early 2021, unemployment has risen steadily since mid 2021 and interest rates are rising so is the cost of living and house prices are falling. Tell me what in their opinion does this economic recovery look like when every metric is going in the wrong direction. Every false positive prediction they make has been spectacularly wrong for the last 5 years.? Talk about blowing smoke up our backsides.
That's fairy dust stuff. The facts tell us; Inflation has risen steadily since early 2021,
Yes indeed. The gold price has roughly tripled since early 2021, depending on the exact dates you use.
Even the beleaguered rat poison is up similarly over the same time period.
As proxies for the the impacts of monetary inflation or debasement, that suggests something.
• chocolate boxes was $12.57 per 250 grams box, up 62.8% monthly
• chocolate block was $6.89 per 250 grams, up 16.6% monthly
Cocoa price down almost 70% since its peak a little over 12 months ago. And the price has slumped to around USD 4,000 per ton for the first time since 2023 as consumers cut back and chocolate makers reduce cocoa content in some products. Bloomrie reports that cocoa processors in Europe — the world’s largest consuming region — saw bean grindings in Q4 fall to the lowest level in data going back to 2013. With demand weakening, forecasts are now pointing to supply surpluses in the coming years, adding further downward pressure on prices and renewed challenges for farmers in West Africa.
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/COCOA/?timeframe=60M
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-15/europe-cocoa-grindin…
I read butter is slumping/crashing internationally. As a key input that should push down some prices of things like bread.... just looked at my Countdown aaaand Anchor still nearly $9 a block.
We are being fleeced.
Nothing new sadly. Isn't the current price based on the most recent auction for milk solids, and until that batch comes through (with lower price), consumers see no change at the checkout? Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong as it's an intriguing area
Might want to check out the latest Fonterra auction.
We are fortunate indeed. Part of a Perplexity a.i. answer helps give us all perspective.
'Today in New Zealand
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Recent estimates put average household food spending at about NZD 238 per week.
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Stats NZ data collated by MoneyHub show a median hourly wage around NZD 34.25 in 2025.
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If you very roughly assign that weekly food bill to one full‑time worker, it equates to about 7 hours of work at the median wage; if two adults share the bill, it is more like 3–4 hours each per week.
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Using more generous per‑adult food budgets (around NZD 107–134 per week for a single person on a “healthy diet”), you get something like 3–4 hours of work per week at the median wage per adult to cover food, or around half an average working day.
So a reasonable ballpark today is roughly half a day’s work per week of a median‑paid adult to secure their own food; poorer households and higher supermarket prices push that up, better‑paid workers push it down.
Around 1900 (New Zealand/UK industrial economy)
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Historical work on 19th–early‑20th‑century Britain (a decent proxy for settler NZ) finds low‑wage rural workers spending around 75% of their income on food in the 1840s, with miners closer to 58%.
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Broad applications of Engel’s law suggest that many low‑income households around 1900 still spent 40–60% of income on food, versus perhaps 10–20% in rich countries today.
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If you assume a 60‑hour work‑week common for manual workers then, and say 50% of income went on food, that implies roughly 30 hours of work per week to buy food for the household.
On a per‑adult basis that is easily 20–40 hours per week of work value tied up in food for a typical breadwinner, several times today’s burden.
Middle Ages (European benchmark)
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Detailed reconstructions for England show that in the 1200s an unskilled worker had to work about 35.4 hours to afford a bushel of wheat, compared with only 0.84 hours in 2022.
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For other staples like rice and oats, required hours similarly collapsed from many hours of labour per unit to small fractions of an hour over the centuries.
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Contemporary estimates of medieval working time suggest roughly 180–220 working days a year at perhaps 8–10 hours per day for many peasants, and food would have absorbed the bulk of their cash or in‑kind income.
Putting those strands together, it is plausible that a medieval peasant household effectively devoted the equivalent of most of an adult’s working time—easily 60–80 hours per modern “week” equivalent in labour value—to securing staple food (either directly on their own land or via labour to buy grain), with very little surplus.'
Normalizing the price of a Big Mac as of 2025, Aotearoa is cheaper than:
Switzerland, Norway, U.S., UK, Sweden, Denmark, Canada
More or less on par with Aussie, S'pore
More expensive than:
South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan
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